EXCEL

Pivot Charts

When you have created a pivot table you can use this to produce an associated chart.  We are going to produce a pie chart showing the total goals scored by each team over the period shown.  We have changed our pivot table to show the Sum of Goals with no decimal places.  In order to start creating our chart we need to move the Date field to become the Page field so that we are given the overall totals on their own.  When you have dragged the Date field up beside the Player field in the Page section, drag the Player field totally out of the pivot table and drop it anywhere in the blank area of the spreadsheet to remove it.  We now have a simple summary of our data as shown below .

Click anywhere on the pivot table and then click on the Chart icon in the pivot table toolbar and you will see a bar chart displayed.  Click the Chart icon again and a window will appear to allow you to choose the type of chart you would like.

We are going to produce a simple pie chart.  Click on the Pie option from the list on the left of the window shown below and then choose the type of pie chart from the graphics on the right.  Now click the Next button.

Under the Titles section of the next window shown in Figure 105 you can enter a title for your pie chart.

When you have set the title, click on the Legend section and you can choose the positioning of your legend as shown below.  If you do not want a legend you can remove the tick from the Show legend box, if you do not have a legend you will need to label the areas of your chart instead.

Finally, if you want the sections of your chart labelled in a special way you can use the Data Labels section to do this.  We are going to label each section with a value so that we can see the total number of goals.

When you click Next, you can choose where you want the chart to be placed from the window shown below.  In order to obtain a good-sized chart it is a good idea to place it in a new worksheet.

Make sure the new sheet option is selected and click Finish.

The chart is now displayed on a new worksheet but there is a grey border behind the pie chart which we want to remove.

To do this, double click on the grey area and the Format Plot Area window is displayed as shown below.

By setting the bullet by None under the Area section on the right of the Format Plot Area window above we can remove the grey background.  The Sample box shows the result.  It is also a good idea to click the None option under Border so that you don’t have an outline around your pie chart.

The chart is now tidier but would look better if we could not see the pivot chart field boxes.  To hide the field boxes, click on the arrow on the pivot chart toolbar and choose Hide PivotChart Field Buttons from the drop-down menu shown below.

Here is the finished pivot chart.