Easily Make Doughnut Charts in Tableau

A quick tutorial on creating a doughnut chart in Tableau.

Pie charts have fallen under criticism by the analytics community in recent years. Although the visualization itself may not differ much, doughnut charts are a typically suggested alternative to the oh-so criticized pie chart. Despite this, doughnut charts have also been criticized for being inefficient at conveying insights. A main criticism for both pie and doughnut charts are their inefficiency at displaying negative or small values. I think as long as your data isn’t too complex, a doughnut chart (and, yes, even a pie chart) can still be used as a powerful visualization tool.

We will start the same way we would for making a pie chart. The data I will be using for this example is a cocoa beans export dataset available here: https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w52 .

I will start by dragging the “Region” dimension into the “Color” box on the “Marks” card. Now change the layout in the “Marks” card drop down menu from the default “Automatic” to “Pie”. You’ll realize the initial default pie chart is far too small. From the top drop down menu, select “Entire View” instead of “Standard” to let the pie chart fill your worksheet. Now we can add the “Import in Tonnes” measure to the “Angle” box in the “Marks” card to complete our pie chart.

We now have a very basic pie chart. To transform this into a doughnut chart, we will start by adding custom measures into the “Rows” shelf at the top of the page. For this example I’ll be using “SUM(0)” to anchor my pie charts to 0 on the axis.

From here, all you need to do is resize the charts and join the axes to give your chart the doughnut effect we’re after. We’ll start by resizing the top chart. Resize it with the sizing slider-scale by clicking on “Size” in the “Marks” card. Make it bigger than the bottom chart as this will be the outer doughnut ring that conveys all the data. We’ll resize the bottom chart once we’ve combined the axes but for now we can actually remove the “Region” dimension as we don’t need this to be a pie chart any longer. The bottom chart will act as the “doughnut hole” for this visualization. Click on the measure in the row shelf and select “Dual Axis” to combine the axes.

Great, we’re almost there. Now we just need to resize the inner circle and change the color. Make sure you have the correct chart selected in the “Marks” card when resizing and coloring. Optionally, you can remove the zero and grid lines in the formatting shelf by right-clicking on the worksheet and selecting “Format”. You can also add desired dimensions/measures to the “Label” box in the “Marks” card to give labels on your chart where needed.

As you can see in this example, the doughnut chart visualization can be clean and effective at conveying data when the data isn’t too complex. Doughnut charts may be favored over pie charts because of their ability to utilize the middle space to display separate values and KPIs.

I hope I was able to show you a new skill in Tableau or just give you another option to use over those pesky yet tempting pie charts!