How to Make a Doughnut Chart

A doughnut chart is the pie chart’s more contemporary sibling: the same slices, arranged around an empty center. Making one here takes a single click beyond making a pie, so this guide spends most of its words on the decisions the click leaves open, especially the hole.

Start with the data, as always

Enter categories and values in the data table, or paste two columns from Excel or Google Sheets. Doughnut charts carry the same requirement as pies: the parts must sum to a meaningful whole. Budget categories, survey answers, traffic sources, revenue segments all qualify. If your numbers do not add up to anything sensible as a total, no ring shape will fix that.

While the data is fresh, tidy it. Doughnuts are slightly less forgiving of tiny categories than pies, because a 2 percent share gets even less visible area as a thin arc than as a thin wedge. The group-small-slices button collapses the long tail into one Other slice.

The one-click transformation

Select Doughnut in the chart type control. The pie opens into a ring immediately, keeping your colors, labels, and everything else. Nothing about the data changes: each arc spans exactly the angle its wedge did, so the chart tells the same story with different posture.

Why do it at all? Three practical reasons. The hole gives you center space for a headline figure. The lighter shape suits modern layouts and dashboards where a solid disc feels heavy. And several rings side by side compare more gracefully than several solid pies, useful when you show the same breakdown for two periods or segments.

Choosing the hole size

The hole slider runs from 0, a plain pie, to 90 percent of the radius, a hairline ring. The extremes are rarely right.

Small holes, under about 40 percent, look like a pie with a puncture, indecisive rather than styled. Very large holes, past 75 percent, are elegant but starve the arcs: thin rings make slice proportions harder to compare and force every label outside.

The comfortable band is 50 to 65 percent. In that range the arcs stay thick enough to read and label, while the center opens up properly. Where in the band? Larger holes when you plan to put something in the center; smaller when the chart must work hard at small sizes, like a dashboard tile.

Judge it live. Drag the slider with your real data on screen and stop where the chart still reads instantly.

Using the center

The hole earns its place when something useful lives in it. The strongest candidates are the total (“$84,200”), the count (“214 responses”), or the single number the chart exists to deliver (“68% renewed”).

The exported chart leaves the hole empty, so there are two ways to fill it. The simplest is the chart title: a title like “Q2 revenue by channel, $84k total” delivers the figure without touching the hole. For true center text, export with a transparent background and drop the number into the hole in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Figma, or wherever the chart is headed. The transparent background means the ring composites cleanly over anything.

Labels on a ring

Label mechanics work the same as on a pie, with one geometric difference: inside labels sit within the ring band, which is narrower than a full wedge. On a generous ring at a decent size, names and percentages fit fine. As the ring thins or slices multiply, the auto placement starts moving labels outside with leader lines, which keeps everything legible.

If your ring is thin by design, skip inside labels entirely: force outside placement for consistency, or hide slice labels and lean on the legend.

Export and reuse

Export works like every chart here: PNG at up to 4x for slides and documents, SVG for design tools, PDF for print, and copy to clipboard for the fastest paste into a deck. The chart saves to your browser automatically, the My Charts list keeps named versions, and the share URL hands the exact chart, hole size and all, to anyone you send it to. No watermark, no account, no catch.