Graphing Tutorial: Pie Graphs Walkthrough

Pie charts are useful when the groups represented by the independent variable are all discrete categories (e.g. red, yellow, blue. . .) rather than a numerical sequence (e.g. 1,2,3. . .). In addition, the categories also represent all the subsets of a whole—all the category values add up to 100%. In other words, you have the entire pie!

  1. Click the green box to open a text box to set the title for your graph.
  2. Once you’ve entered your title, a blank pie chart will appear.
  3. On the right, two entry boxes will appear for you to add the categories and values to your pie chart.
  4. For ‘Category title’, add the name for the category (the type of water or water source).
  5. For ‘Value’, add a positive number. You can enter data until your remaining percent becomes 0.