There is always a debate about how good or evil pie charts are. While visualization purists believe pie charts should be avoided at all costs, newbies find creating and using pies very easy and often over do it. I have blogged few techniques involving pie chart visualizations like in-cell pie charts, speedometer charts, donut clocks and the response from readers has been mixed.
My opinion with respect to pie charts is that, when used in moderation they are OK. I say this because of the overwhelming awareness of pie charts. You can go and show it a school kid with the same comfort level as you can to your CEO and both will interpret the message in the same way (that is provided your pie chart is interpretable). Also, pies with 2 or 3 slices tend to be easier to understand.
Yesterday, I saw this very good example of using pie-charts in moderation at CNN’s Where tax burden falls chart (see it on the right)
The chart shows, how tax payers and tax burden is broken up across each of the income ranges. It enables quick analysis of disparities between income, representation % and contribution % in simple, understandable pie chart form.
Also, see how they avoided the trap of making two big pie charts. despite having the choice putting 2 giant pies (one for tax payer % breakup by bracket, another for how much taxes each bracket paid) these folks avoided that trap and chose to stick to multiple pie charts. If you had combined them in to two pie charts, I am sure it would have been a disaster. (corrected to make it simple to understand :D)
What is your stance on pie charts?
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.