Super Easy Introduction to Excel Sunburst Charts Tutorial.

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Excel Hierarchical Sunburst Charts, One Tier, Two Tiers and Three Tiers.

The Sunburst Chart is one of the most overlooked chart options in Excel. It is however incredibly useful when you need, for instance a visual representation of where your business strengths are over time. Whether you need to quickly identify your best sales people, or the best sellers in your stock inventory, the Sunburst Chart gives an impactful visual representation of what comes out on top, whilst pushing the lower performers to the back of the queue.

On the inverse side, Excel's Sunburst Chart can aso be quickly used to see where your greatest areas of waste or expense are, whilst pushing your lower-end overheads back into obscurity.

In this tutorial we are going to create three Sunburst Charts

Lesson 1) A simple one tier Sunburst Chart showing name and quantity in one segment.

Lesson 2) Two tiered Sunburst Chart showing name, month and quantity.

Lesson 3) Three tiered Sunburst Chart showing name, month, weeks and quantity.

At the end of each lesson there is a video demonstrating the full process of creating the Sunburst chart.

For the purposes of this tutorial we have extended the datasets used in our 'Super Easy VLOOKUP lesson', to examine the egg laying performance of our six chickens over the first quarter of the year (January to March).

Lesson 1) Simple One-Tier Sunburst Chart Taking Data from just two Columns.

Selecting the Data:

We are going to select data from just two columns for this super simple Sunburst Chart ('Chicken Name' and 'Number of Eggs Laid').

From these two datasets we will create a single tiered Sunburst Chart which quickly visualises how our chickens performed between January and March.

Once we have selected our raw data, we are going to create our chart. Go to the 'Insert' tab and then the Chart dropdown down box which shows up the extended list of chart types available.

You will find the Sunburst Chart at the bottom under 'Other' (the fourth one along).

When we click on the Sunburst Chart, our basic single tier chart is automatically generated in an unedited state.

Our next task is to move the chart to somewhere more suitable (using drag and drop) and to re-size the chart. You can see this in action in the video demonstration at the end of this lesson.

You can see that once the Sunburst Chart has been resized all of the text in there becomes visible.

Our next task is to format our Sunburst Chart.

Double click on the chart to reveal the formatting options.

The main Format menu gives us just two options to edit: Chart Title and Series 1.

Formatting the Chart Title

Starting with the Chart Title we are going to rename our chart, 'Quarter 1 Chicken Performance (Simple View)'.

Click on the Chart Title and rename it in the edit box. In this instance we also gave the Title a Fill colour and an Outline colour and left everything else unchanged.

Formatting the Series

Now we are going to edit the Series. Click on the Series 1 forward arrow to reveal the options.

We don't want to change the Series Name or the Fill in this instance, but we can change the Outline which will add a colour between the segments of our chart.

Sunburst Chart Series Outline Editing

Sunburst Chart Series Outline Edited

Formatting Data Labels

Now, click on Data Labels, which is a subheading of Series 1. There are a lot more options here.

You can see that within the Data Label Menu there are three checkboxs: Series Name, Category Name and Value.

In this example, the most important thing to do is to select the checkbox for Value so that information from both columns of data is shown in our single tier Sunburst Chart.

You can see that when we select the Value checkbox the numeric value for the number of eggs each chicken produced in a month appears in our chart. This is how we get two columns of Excel data to appear in a single tier Sunburst Chart.

Data Label Custom Separators

Next we want to change the way the Chickens' names and the number of eggs laid are separated. By default they are separated by a comma. We are going to use the Separator edit box to alter this. Click on the Separator dropdown to see the options. We are going to select the bottom option Custom and type the following: ' :'

When we hit enter, this creates a new Separator in our Sunburst Chart layout which you can see in the image above whereby the default comma has been replaced by a colon and a space.

That pretty much concludes Lesson 1 in which we created our super simple single tiered Excel Sunburst Chart.

Watch the video below to see it in action.

Excel Sunburst Chart Single Tier (video length: 2 minutes and 2 seconds)

What is remarkable about this simple one tier Sunburst Chart is the sheer volume of information that we can see at a glance.

For instance, we can see immediately that Bertha is our most consistent high-yield chicken, and that Margaret and Chantelle's performance is highly variable month-by-month. We can also ascertain that Polly and Lucy have fairly consistent low yields. It is also quickly apparent that Gertrude had one incredibly good month and two average months.

This is the sort of information that we can start to act on to make improvements around the farm.

What makes the two column, single tier Sunburst Chart so effective is that it renders this level of information immediately obvious.

Usually, a Sunburst Chart is recommended when you have more than two columns of data. This enables the Sunburst Chart to visualise a hierarchy, such as in an instance where we have say one column of data which represents months, a column of data for the chickens' names and one for the number of eggs laid each month. We will look at this in lesson two.

Tip: If your Sunburst Chart doesn't display quite as you want try rearranging the columns (whilst keeping your numeric data in the far right column). You can also try custom sorting your data, which we will also explore in the next lesson.

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Lesson 2: Two tiered Sunburst Chart showing name, month and quantity.

In this second part of this introduction to Sunburst Charts we will follow up by showing you how to create a two-layered hierarchical Sunburst Chart using three columns of data. This introduces the concept of hierarchy.

In order to create a hierarchical chart from 3 columns of data, we will need to look at data sorting in order to take control of which columns of data are prioritised in our charts and whether they are sorted in ascending or descending order.

In the Excel spreadsheet in the image below the data has been sorted firstly by Month (in alphabetical order ascending) and secondly by 'Number of Eggs Laid' in ascending order for each month. When we create our chart from this then the months are prioritised to sort from the best month through to the worst month going clockwise.

The above chart is useful, but what if we wanted to prioritise the best performing chicken, rather than the best performing month?

For this we need to look at data sorting using a Custom Sort.

Custom Sorting Data in Excel

We are going to amend the way our data is displayed using a Custom Sort so that the Chicken Names are prioritised to start with the best performing chickens going clockwise through to the worst performing chickens.

In order to do this, first select all three columns of data and click on your right mouse button, as shown in the image below.

Go to Sort and then select Custom Sort. This will open the Custom Sort dialog box.

We are going to change the primary sort criteria from 'Month' to 'Chicken Name' and click OK.

Now we can create our Sunburst chart with the Chicken Names prioritised in the Sort.

We can see that the chart now starts with the best performing Chicken (Bertha) and her best performing Month (January), working clockwise all the way to the worst performing chicken (Lucy) and her worst performing Month (January).

Tip: You will usually want to experiment with custom data sorting to discover which configuration best suits your own specific datasets when creating charts from your raw data.

To format your first hierarchical Sunburst Chart in Excel follow the procedures that we used in Lesson 1.

You can see the complete process for creating our hierarchical Sunburst Chart in the video below:

Excel Sunburst Chart Hierarchical Two Tier (video length: 2 minutes and 37 seconds)

You will notice that in this instance, we didn't add a custom separator between the Month and the number of eggs laid, but don't worry, you can revist the instructions for custom separators in Part 1 for this or you can see the custom separator in action in our video in Part three (The Three Tier Hierarchical Sunburst Chart).

Lesson 3: Three Tier Hierarchical Excel Sunburst Chart

Now that we have seen the two tier Sunburst chart in action, we're going to create a three tier version which uses four columns of Excel data.

This time we are going to make it more interesting by only having partial data in the fourth tier.

In order to get started we have added a new column of data which breaks down the month of January into weeks for Bertha. Since she laid so many eggs in January we want to look at how she did on each week. Notice that in order to do this we also had to insert four new rows to accommodate the hierarchical shift between weeks and months.

We should take some time to break down this table now to explore why it is going to work as a three tier chart.

The first rule that we have followed is to keep our numerical data ('Number of Eggs Laid') on the right.

The second thing we have done is to use the four inserted rows to put our figures for eggs laid per week into the same column as the figures for eggs laid per month.

We have also purposely left the column for weeks empty, except for the four weeks in January that we are interested in highlighting.

Now let's create our Sunburst Chart using the same method that we have learnt in Lesson 1 of this tutorial (INSERT > CHART DROPDOWN BOX > SUNBURST CHART).

This is our raw, unedited three tier Sunburst Chart:

As you can see, the four weeks that we wanted to highlight now stick out like bicycle spokes as the third tier of our Sunburst Chart.

At the default size, however, the chart doesn't really show us that much information. So our first job is to resize the chart to get a better look.

Once we have resized our Sunburst Chart we can see more information; such as that Bertha's best week in January was on Week 2 and her worst week was in Week 4 (Remember in Lesson 2 that we custom sorted our 'Number of Eggs Laid' data in ascending order, so that the weeks don't appear as weeks 1 to 4, but in order of the number of eggs laid).

Finally we need to format our three tier Sunburst Chart which, since we learnt how to do this in Lesson 1, we will just demonstrate in the final video of the tutorial:

Excel Sunburst Chart Hierarchical Three Tier (video length: 2 minutes and 24 seconds)

If you want to learn more about Excel's Sunburst Chart ask us about our Excel training courses.

If you enjoyed this tutorial you might also like:

• 17 Excel Functions for Absolute Beginners
  
  
• DateDif() the Hidden Excel Function that You Should Know About
  
  
• Excel XLOOKUP Function Tutorial (with fun examples)
  
  
• The Best Places to Teach Yourself the Excel LAMBDA Function
  
  
• How do I translate Excel Functions into other Languages?
  
  
• Create a Simple Excel VLOOKUP in Under 2 Minutes
  
  
• Concise Guide to Excel Shortcut Keys
  
  
• The Excel CONVERT Function Conversion Toolkit
  
  
• How Long Does it Take to Learn Excel?
  
  

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