How to Make a Pie Chart (Free, in Under 2 Minutes)

A pie chart needs three things: categories, numbers, and about two minutes. This guide walks through making one in our free editor, plus the small decisions along the way that separate a clean chart from a cluttered one.

Step 1: Get your data in

Open the editor and you will see a data table with a few sample rows. Replace them with your own categories and values. Each row becomes one slice.

If your data already lives in a spreadsheet, do not retype it. Select the two columns in Excel or Google Sheets, copy, and paste anywhere in the data table. The editor detects the columns, skips header rows, and cleans up currency symbols and thousands separators on its own. A CSV file works too: drop it on the upload area and pick which columns hold labels and values.

Your numbers do not need to be percentages. Enter 34 survey votes or 1,450 dollars of rent as they are. The chart sizes each slice by its share of the total and can print the percentages for you later.

Step 2: Sanity-check the preview

The chart redraws live with every keystroke, so by the time your data is in, the chart exists. Before styling anything, look at it once with fresh eyes. Is the biggest slice the one you expected? Is any category missing? Typos in numbers are far easier to catch as a wrong-sized slice than as a digit in a table.

This is also the moment to deal with clutter. If you have nine categories and four of them are tiny, click the group-small-slices button. It merges everything under a threshold you choose into one Other slice, which usually turns a messy chart into a readable one in a single click.

Step 3: Choose the style

The plain pie is the default, and for most jobs it is right. One click switches to a doughnut, a half circle, or a waffle grid if the context calls for it, and slices can be reordered by dragging rows in the table.

Color comes from palettes. There are twenty, from corporate blues to neon, including a colorblind-safe palette based on the Okabe-Ito colors and a print-friendly palette that survives grayscale photocopying. Click any slice to override its color with an exact hex value, which is how you match brand colors.

Step 4: Label it properly

A chart that will appear inside a document can lean on a legend. A chart that stands alone, on a slide or in a social post, should carry its labels directly on the slices, because making readers ping-pong between colors and a legend is friction you can remove.

The label controls let you show any combination of the category name, the raw value, and the percentage. Labels sit inside slices when there is room and move outside with leader lines when slices get thin, and you can force either placement. Percentages are rounded so they always total exactly 100, which spares you the classic 99-percent chart.

Step 5: Title it like a finding

The weakest titles describe the chart: “Budget breakdown”. The strongest state what it shows: “Housing takes a third of our monthly budget”. At minimum, include what was measured, for whom, and when. If the data came from somewhere citable, put the source in the title or the caption under the chart.

Step 6: Export it

The export menu covers the usual destinations. PNG at 1x, 2x, or 4x for documents and slides. SVG when you need a vector file for design tools or print. PDF for anything headed to a printer. Copy to clipboard is the fastest route into PowerPoint or Google Docs: one click, then paste.

Nothing you export carries a watermark, and you never created an account to get here.

Keep it, share it, reuse it

The editor autosaves your work in your browser, so closing the tab loses nothing. Save named charts to the My Charts list if you make several. And every chart has a share URL that encodes the whole thing, data and styling included, so a colleague can open your exact chart and continue from it without any file changing hands.