Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast,
i'm Bill Jelen.
Well, here's another great question from the
Southeast Accounting show: Someone said, "I
want to make a pie chart out of a coin."
So, we have a picture here of a dollar coin,
I want to make that into a pie chart.
And you would think that this would be simple
to do, but it turns out that it's not.
First of all, my first attack was to select
the coin, and we copy the coin to the clipboard,
and then I go ahead and create the pie chart.
So, Insert; we'll choose a 2d Pie; and when
I select this series I'm going to format the
series.
Best way to do that: Ctrl+1.
And on the Fill, I'm going to say it's a Picture
Fill, when I Insert from the Clipboard and
click Close.
But unfortunately, what they do is they try
and squeeze that picture into every slice
of the pie-- not what we're trying to do at
all.
So, here's the better approach: We're going
to build our chart-- actually I'm going to
move the coin out of the way first-- we're
going to build our chart-- Insert, Pie Chart
2D Pie.
And there's a couple things we have to do.
First of all, I want to get rid of the legend--
turn off legend-- and then in Data Labels,
I want to go into More Data Label options;
say that I want to see Category name and a
percentage; and also say that it's going to
be at the outside end-- I want those words
outside of the coin-- click Close.
Alright, now, two other things we're going
to have to do.
We're going to have to change both the pie
itself to be transparent, and the whole chart
area to be transparent.
So I'll choose the chart area first, use Ctrl+1
to get in to format that, and say there's
no Fill.
Now, I want to do the same thing for the chart
itself.
Amazingly, in Excel 2007, we don't have to
close the Format dialog box-- I can just reach
back here and choose the chart.
And now, on this Fill, I'm also going to say
No Fill on the border.
Let's kind of try to figure out a nice thick
border; so we use a solid line and choose
a color that's going to be complementary to
the coin-- so maybe a blue-- and on Border
Styles, kind of make a little bit thicker
so that way it stands out well against that
image in the background.
Alright.
So now, basically, what we've done is we've
created a completely blank chart that you
can see through.
And I'm going to take my coin and drag it
here, right behind the chart, and now, frankly,
you just have some adjusting to do.
And it's a little bit maddening as you try
and adjust this to get everything to line
up.
But give it a few minutes of time, you can
get pretty good approximation where you have
your chart right on top of the coin, and it
looks like you've made a pie chart out of
the coin.
Actually, you know, the one last thing I would
do here is, I would get rid of the border
around the whole chart area-- So we'll Format
that and go to Border Color, and say No line,
just to make sure that that entire line goes
away from the chart.
Pretty cool.
This works in the same way in Excel 2003--
you're going to Format the chart area, No
Fil,l Format the series, and No Fill there
as well, and then basically try and get it
lined up.
It's a little bit tougher in Excel 2003 because
as you're moving the chart, the transparency
goes away.
You actually can't see the coin as you're
moving the chart.
A little improvement here in Excel 2007 to
make it just a bit easier.
Well, I want to thank you for stopping by,
we'll see you next time for another netcast
from MrExcel.
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