Explode one section of an Excel pie chart

Pie Charts are a very popular method of visualising how much an item makes up of a total. Within Pie Charts you can make the ‘slices’ explode outwards. We don’t find this very useful. We do however like to explode one section of an Excel pie chart to emphasise it (see YouTube clip below).

YouTube Explode one section of an Excel pie chart

Pull out 1 slice of a pie chart

If you right click on the Pie Chart and choose the Format Data Series you will see that you can choose to explode all the slices (Pie Explosion below). You can also change the angle of the slice.

Explode one section of an Excel pie chart

In order to explode only 1 slice, it is as simple as:

  • Click on the particular slice until only it is activated.
  • Click, hold and drag it out as far as you want. pie-charts

You can do this to as many slices as you want.

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