Pie Chart Maker
Paste labels and values, get a pie chart with percentages worked out for you.
About this tool
A pie chart answers one question well: how does this whole divide up? Budget by department, traffic by source, votes by option, storage by file type. Paste the labels and the numbers and the percentages are worked out from your total, so you can paste raw counts and never touch a calculator.
It is worth knowing what pies are bad at, because it decides whether this is the right tool. People judge angles poorly — much worse than they judge lengths — so slices within a few percent of each other are effectively indistinguishable. Seven or eight thin wedges become a colour wheel that has to be decoded through the legend, one at a time. If your point is "these three are roughly equal", a bar chart makes it in a glance; a pie hides it.
Where a pie earns its place is dominance: one slice taking most of the circle is a fact the eye grasps instantly and remembers. Slices are drawn in the order you paste them, so sort your rows largest-first if you want the conventional clockwise arrangement. Everything runs locally — nothing is uploaded, and the PNG is produced by your own browser.
Frequently asked questions
What should I paste in?
Two columns: a label and a number, one row per slice. The numbers do not have to add up to 100 — percentages are worked out from the total of whatever you paste, so raw counts like 1,284 and 431 work exactly as well as 64 and 19.
Why are some slices missing a percentage label?
Slices below five percent are left unlabelled on the pie itself. At that size the text is wider than the wedge it belongs to, so labels start overlapping each other and pointing at the wrong slice. The legend still names every slice, and the colours match.
I pasted several number columns and only one was used.
That is expected. A pie shows how one whole divides up, so only the first value column becomes slices. If you have two years of data to compare, two pies are harder to read than one grouped bar chart — the eye compares lengths far better than it compares angles.
When should I not use a pie chart?
When you have more than about six slices, when the values are close together, or when the parts do not add up to a meaningful whole. Angles are hard to compare: 22% and 25% look identical as wedges but obviously different as bars. Pies work best when one or two slices dominate and that dominance is the point.
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. Slices are computed and drawn on this page, no request leaves the browser while you work, and Download PNG renders at 2x through the Canvas API. Budget splits and market share figures stay on your machine.