How to create a Multiple Donuts chart
A multiple donuts chart is useful when you want to show proportional parts of multiple wholes and want to give the reader an extra data point in the middle. The individual donut charts should not have too many slices, as the chart otherwise gets cluttered and becomes hard to read – if you want to show more than five parts per donut, consider grouping them.
Below is an example of a multiple donuts chart that makes good use of the part of the whole concept. We can see the shares of three countries' wealth that the bottom 50%, the next 40% and the top 10% of citizens own:
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Preparing and importing the data
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If you want to create this chart type, your data needs to be in a certain format. You'll need:
- One header row containing descriptive labels.
- One column containing at least two categories. This will determine the label in the donut slices. In our case, that's "bottom 50%", "next 40%" and "top 10%.
- At least one column containing numeric values. The values in the second, third, etc. column will define the size of the donut slices. In your final chart, one numerical column will result in one extra donut. The more numerical columns you upload, the more donuts your chart will have.
The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that a donut chart always represents a whole, i.e. 100%. Therefore, you can only use data that is based on exclusive values. Making a donut chart of a survey that allows multiple answers will lead to a misleading chart. In that case, it is better to opt for a stacked bar chart than a multiple donuts chart.
Below is the data we used to create the chart at the top of the page:
category Canada China Norway bottom 50% 5.6 11.0 1.1 next 40% 46.7 40.6 49.4 top 10% 47.7 48.4 49.5 -
Once you have prepared your data, create a new chart in Datawrapper. If you're a first time user, head over to the homepage and click on "Start creating". If you already have an account, click on the ''New Chart'' in the top row in your dashboard In Step 1: ''Upload'' you can copy & paste your dataset or upload it as a .csv, Excel or google Spreadsheet. After pasting the data, the text field on the right will look something like this:
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Click
"Proceed" at the bottom right to go to the next step:
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Check & Describe
In the second step, you can check if your dataset was imported correctly and make changes to it - if necessary. If you did not upload a header row, you have to untick "First row as label" to avoid losing your first row of data. Always remember to do this if you don't have descriptive row and column headers.
In step 2, your data will automatically be arranged in columns and rows. You can see that Datawrapper correctly recognized your numbers as numbers (and not as text or dates) because they are colored in blue and are right-aligned. To learn more about the Datawrapper's automatic recognition of data formats, visit this article.
Click on "Proceed" at the bottom left to go to Step 3: Visualize:
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Visualize
Now comes the fun part. Under the tab ''Chart type'', you will see a range of chart types displayed. Odds are that your data will automatically be displayed as a line chart. To change that, click on the "Multiple Donuts" icon in the grid of available chart types:
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- You will now see a multiple donuts chart, without a title, descriptions or customized colors. The next step would be to further refine, annotate & define this chart. We cover this in a separate short tutorial found here.
