Excel – convert a list of names directly into a pie chart in Excel

chartsmicrosoft excelpivot tablepivot-chart

I've asked a group of 50 students who their favourite teacher was. The survey has exported the data and I've sorted it, so the list is now something like:

Abrams

Abrams

Butler

Cromwell

Cromwell

Cromwell

Edison

Foster

Foster

Foster

Foster

Foster

Walters

…in Excel, can I make it create a pie chart that takes these values and creates a proportional pie cart by the weight of each name against the total number of entries? I could do all this manually, by adding the duplicates and doing the math and manually doing, well, all that work, but I was hoping there'd be an automatic way to have Excel do the consolidating-and-math bit. There are a lot of things in this survey like the above list, so it's be great to be able to repeat this for a number of questions and answers.

Best Answer

You'll be wanting a Pivot Chart. Here's the steps for Excel 2010:

  1. Ensure all your data is in one column and has a header row.
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  2. Select said column and in the Ribbon go to "Insert" -> "PivotChart"
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  3. If you selected your data already, the "Create PivotTable with PivotChart" box should already be populated with the correct range of cells.
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  4. Set up your PivotTable. Assuming your header is called "Names", you'll need to add that field to both "Axis Fields" and "Values"
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  5. You should have a bar chart at this point
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  6. On the Ribbon, click on "Change Chart Type".
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  7. Select what you want and you should have a pie chart ready to go.
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