Nerd Alert...Excel help

McCracken

McCracken

Logan Can't See This
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Jul 9, 2005
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I'm trying to show change over time in size. I want to show a pie chart then vs. a pie chart now. Basically, let's say my company makes 10,000 burritos a day and our toppings make up 25% each (beans, rice, cheese and meat). Now my company makes 100,000 burritos and still has 25% of each ingredient. How do I make that happen in Excel? I could always make a pie chart then blow the other up but I want them to be in the correct proportions. Has anyone done this before?
 
A Pie Chart would look the same, a Pie chart is designed to show a % of overall so it would look the same, regardless if you setup the excel as a % of total or as a raw number. Unless I am misunderstanding what you are trying to do.
 
I'd love to use something different but management wants two pies.

edit: I just need it to show different sizes. for example if one was 50 and the other 100. I need one to be twice the size of the other.
 
McCracken said:
I'd love to use something different but management wants two pies.

edit: I just need it to show different sizes. for example if one was 50 and the other 100. I need one to be twice the size of the other.
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If you want to "trick" them, just use a larger and a smaller pie graph of the same thing. But really, that isn't what the design of a Pie Graph is for.
 
Can you throw a constant in too make it change the percentages? For instance, if you used the companies capacity too make burritos as the total, (100,000 Burritos) but then used only the amount of ingredients used at each point in time, then the percentage of total ingredients would get bigger and fill the pie as the capacity to make burritos was reached....

A pie chart really is a poor choice for what they want though, any chance you could do some examples of other charts and show them to management so they'd see how much better the data is represented?
 
Sounds to me like what you really should be using is a percent bar graph.
In those, the height of the whole whole "bar" is the total, but within the bar it has different colors, like a red, blue, and yellow portion; each portion is for a different value.
so in your case it would be 2 bars, the seconds is 10x as tall as the first, but you can easily see that the relative portion of each color within teh bar is the same.
 
A Pie chart is designed to show percentage of a whole regardless of size.
A Pie chart would be perfect for the tomato company who wants to show they have 25% of the pizza market regardless of the number of pies sold.
A pie chart sucks for what you are wanting it to do. If your upper management really wants this, find a new job you are fucked.
 
Wow, if using a bar graph vs a pie chart really makes a difference to a company's management, or even requires extra time "for processing"... I'd think that company has serious problems.
 
It was joke but he did put out the new PowerPoint presentation that had the old pie graph comparisons on it. I even put together a snazzy area graph that I thought told a good story. Oh well, I did what I had to do.
 
Ron said:
A pie chart sucks for what you are wanting it to do. If your upper management really wants this, find a new job you are fucked.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately most medium-large companies are like this from what I've seen.
 
Late to the party I know, but the only way I know that you could really use a pie chart for a comparison is within the growth of where you were and where you are. Show the 90k burrito growth, but then you'd have to put a valuation on the toppings to show the increase on COS. I suppose being a finance guy, I'm bias, but unless we're strictly talking market share...percentages don't tell me anything.

jeepinmatt said:
Unfortunately most medium-large companies are like this from what I've seen.
Click to expand...

Hand to God...I once had a $250k capital request rejected because that particular person didn't like the scan quality of the documents. Keep in mind they were the 7th person in the long line of approvers. Keeping in mind, the request was directly and immediately going to be used for fulfilling an extra $4-5MM/yr in orders. By the way I see it, 2 months to collect the data they wanted to see, 2 months to get final approval, they lost out on $1-1.5MM in revenue because every @$$hole wants to flex their authority muscle. I thought with an ROA like that, it would be a no brainer.
 
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