How to create a multiple pies charts

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A multiple pies chart is useful when you want to show proportional parts of multiple wholes. The individual pies should not have too many slices as this clutters the chart and makes it hard to read. If you want to show more than five parts per pie, consider a stacked bar chart instead.

Below is an example of a multiple pies chart that makes good use of the part-to-whole concept. We can see how many people in Germany and in Berlin are married, single, divorced, or widowed:

If you want to create this chart type, here's what you'll need:

  • One header row containing descriptive labels.
  • One column containing at least two categories. This will determine the labels of the pie slices. In our case, that's "Married & civil union", "Single", "Divorced", and "Widowed".
  • At least two columns containing numeric values. The values in the columns will define the size of the pie slices. In your final chart, one numerical column will result in one extra pie. The more numerical columns you upload, the more pies your chart will have.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that a pie chart always represents a whole, i.e. 100%. Making a (multiple) pie chart of a survey that allows multiple answers will lead to a misleading chart. Use a bar chart instead.

That's the data we used to create the chart at the top of the page:

Marital status Germany Berlin
Married & civil union 36202000 1117105
Single 35704000 2072744
Divorced 5692000 318316
Widowed 5141000 192412

Once you have prepared your data, create a new chart in Datawrapper. You can do so by going to our homepage and clicking on Start creating. In step 1: Upload, you can copy & paste your dataset, upload it as a .csv or Excel file, or connect to a Google Sheet. After pasting the data, the text field on the right will look like this:

Click Proceed at the bottom right to go to the next step.

In step 2: Check & Describe, your data has already been 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 Datawrapper's automatic recognition of data formats, visit this article.

Here you can also make changes to the data. To add a unit (like km/h, kg, inch, $, etc.) to your numbers, click on a column header and then add the unit of your choice to the Prepend/append options on the left. You can learn more about adding units to numbers here.

Click on Proceed at the bottom left to go to step 3: Visualize.

Now comes the fun part: You'll see a grid of different chart types under the tab Chart type. Odds are that your data was automatically shown as a line chart. To change that, click on the Multiple Pies symbol in the grid of available chart types:

You will now see a multiple pies chart, without a title, descriptions, or customized colors. Naturally, the next step would be to further refine this chart. Besides Chart type, you'll notice three more tabs in this step: Refine, Annotate, and Layout.

In any tab of step 3: Visualize, you can click, hold, and drag the arrow in the lower right corner to scale the chart window or manually determine the dimensions of the chart by entering values in the boxes below the chart (Size).

We recommend checking what the chart looks like on different screen sizes multiple times while designing it, by clicking on the little icons (mobile, tablet, and computer) below the chart.

Learn more about changing the width and height of your chart in this article.

Let's continue with the Refine tab. Here, we see four panels: Pie slices, Labels, Color legend, and Grouping.

The Pie slices panel lets you decide which colors your slices have, how big your pies are, and in which order the slices appear.

  • Slice color: sets one color for all slices. To give single slices their own colors, turn on Customize colors, click on one or several slices in the list, and pick a new color. Note that the same slices in each pie will be colored the same. All, none, and invert below the list help you select many slices at once, and Reset all changes undoes all your colors. In our chart, we show "Married & civil union" in a strong color and all other slices in shades of gray, so readers see the most important slice right away.
  • Pie size: sets how much of the available space each pie takes up. Smaller pies leave more room around them. The default is 75%.
  • Minimum grid column width: sets how wide each pie's column has to be at least. The wider the columns, the fewer pies fit next to each other, and the more of them move to a new row. The default is 120. Make sure to check what your pies look like on mobile, too.
  • Sort by: shows the slices with the Largest first (the default) or the Smallest first. Choose Keep order to show them in the order of your dataset instead. The first pie decides the order for all pies, so each slice stays in the same place in every pie.

The Labels panel lets you decide which numbers appear in and below your pies.

  • Number format: decides how the numbers appear, for example "1,992,394" or "1.9m". Learn more about all available number formats here.
  • Convert values to percentages: turns your numbers into shares of the whole. That's handy if you uploaded absolute numbers, like the population numbers in our data, but want to show percentages (like we do in our chart).
  • Show inside values: shows the value of each slice inside the slice (on by default).
  • Show value below each pie: shows one more number below each pie (off by default): either the sum of all slices, or, with Show single, the value of one slice you pick.

The Color legend panel lets you add a list of your slice names to the chart.

  • Show color legend: lists the names of your slices next to the pies. Under Position, you can choose whether it appears at the top (the default), at the bottom, on the left, or on the right of the pies. On mobile, the color legend always appears at the top, no matter what you choose.
  • Stack labels: lists the names below each other instead of next to each other (off by default). You can only select to stack labels if the color legend is at the top or at the bottom – if the color legend is on the left or right, labels are stacked automatically.

The Grouping panel lets you combine small slices, so your pies don't get too cluttered.

  • Maximum number of slices: groups the smallest slices into one if your data has more slices than this number (5 by default). Pies with many slices quickly get hard to read, so it's best to keep this number small.
  • Grouped slice label: names the slice that combines the smallest ones. If you leave it empty, Datawrapper calls it "Other".

In the Annotate tab, you're first asked to give your visualization a title, description, notes, source, byline, and an alternative description for screen readers. You can find a detailed explanation of all these Annotate options here.

In the second panel in the Annotate tab, you can emphasize certain pie slices. All the other pie slices will then tone down in their color. To remove added elements, click on the little "x" left of the text in the blue button.

In the Layout tab, you can select an output locale, change the design theme and footer options, and enable social sharing. Find a detailed explanation of all the Layout options here.

In step 4: Publish & Embed, you can first publish your chart and then decide how it gets to your readers. We recommend pasting the embed code into your website or CMS, but you can also share the chart's URL. Learn more about both options here. To use your chart somewhere else, download it as a PNG (on any plan) or as an SVG or PDF (on paid plans). See what each plan includes on our pricing page.

And that's it! You've successfully created and customized a multiple pies chart.

Last updated on October 29th, 2026