Donut & Pie Charts in QuickSight | West Loop Strategy

Hello everyone, my name is Duncan. I'm a data engineer with West Loop Strategy, and AWS Partner. Today for our QuickSight Visuals Series, we're going to be talking about Donut and Pie Charts.

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So when I think of dashboards, one of the first things I see is the pie chart. It's one of the first ways we are taught the idea of 100% as kids. And even now, there's still really great tools to graphically show what's in our data. You know, these two visuals are some of my favorite ways when I want to communicate important aspects of my Dataset. So for right now, let's start with pie charts. They come with three fields group in color by value in small multiples. For now, I'm really just going to focus on those first two, the group by and the value small multiples essentially allows me to turn one visualization into many.

For today, let's say I wanted to see profit and I'm going to change that to a currency in the formatting of my field well. I want to see profit by the regions that my business is active in. So just by adding those two fields into my field wells, I can already tell that the Europe and Middle East region makes up the majority of my business. But if my boss or my client said, "Hey, I still wanna see some numerical values to make sense of this." What I can do is click on that little pencil on the top right of the panel of my visual. And depending on if you're using the old UI, this format visual menu is going to appear on the left or if you're using the new UI that was just released, it's going to appear on the right hand side. Don't worry, this functionality is going to be the same.

What I'm looking for are the data labels. What data labels allow me to do is decide the metric numeral that I'm going to show. I can show just the value, I can show just the percent, or I can show both. I can also decide whether they are inside or outside my visual and I can even change the color so that they're easier to read. A quick tip about this, what you do to your data label is going to affect your tool tip. So just keep that in mind when somebody hovers over and tool tip is on, they're going to be able to see that metric again.

So pie chart looks great and is showing the data how I want. What's the value of using a donut chart if we can just use the pie chart? For me, the two big reasons are going to be that I can get a center metric that shows the total aggregate of what my value field well is showing. And also personally, I find that this is a lot more visually appealing and a little bit easier to interpret than the bigger, older, and clunkier style of a pie chart. But it's really up to you. So if you say I like the donut chart, but I don't want that center metric, you just go back into that format visual well, change this little button, and it gets rid of your center metric.

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