Introduction to Pie Charts in Microsoft Excel 2007

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There are several versions of pie charts that can be created in Microsoft Excel 2007. Depending on your data and what you want to stress with that data, each type of pie chart has its own distinct advantages. In this series, we’ll look at how the same set of data can be represented in several ways through the use of various types of pie charts.

For information on other types of charts, take a look at this broader collection of Excel chart and graph tutorials.

If you’ve ever reached the end of the month and wondered where all of your money went, you’re not alone. However, with so much information from financial accounts available online these days, it’s a lot easier to track this information than it used to be.

For all of the pie charts created in this series, we’ll use a basic monthly personal budget report as our primary data. While this data is fictional, it is similar to the type of information that you can download from online bank and credit card statements. This is certainly not the only application for pie charts, but it is one to which almost everyone can relate.

The Excel file containing the data and the pie charts created in this series has been added to the Windows Platform Media Gallery under the title Microsoft Excel 2007 Pie Charts. Feel free to download this workbook for your own personal use.

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Once the data has been entered, we can use it to construct a pie chart. In the next article of this series, we’ll walk through the steps of creating a basic pie chart and move on to more advanced techniques in later articles.