There are two other ways to open the task pane: You can also use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+1 while a chart element is selected. The fastest way to open the Formatting Task pane is to double-click a chart element. With this single task pane, you can modify not only charts, but also shapes and text in Excel. The new Formatting Task pane is the single source for formatting–all of the different styling options are consolidated in one place. The Formatting Task pane also offers an element selector so you can jump quickly between different elements without having to select one to modify. The pane aligns neatly with the right or left side of the screen, so it’s less likely to obscure the chart, and changes happen in real time, so you can immediately see how your choices affect the chart. In the new Excel, the Format dialog box is replaced by the Formatting Task pane. The box sometimes obscured a portion of the chart, changes entered in the box were not visible until you closed it, and you had to select the exact element on the chart in order to see the options that were the best fit for the job. Until now, precise adjustments to chart elements were made in the Format dialog box. One part of the fluid new experience is the Formatting Task pane. Next time we’ll look at several other Excel charts included in Excel 2013.The new Excel offers a rich set of charting capabilities that make creating and customizing charts simpler and more intuitive. Also watch for how column and bar charts can overcome weaknesses inherent in pie charts. Watch for some Excel features and tricks that can overcome some of these weakness to some extent. Due to the circular nature of the pie chart and the geometry of circles, it’s often hard to determine if a pie slice is twice as big as another slice or just two-thirds as big as another pie slice, for example.

The third challenge with pie charts is determining the relative sizes of pie slices. Readers can usually determine which slice is the biggest, but it can be harder to decide the order of other pie slices. The second challenge is that it’s hard to tell the relative order of the pie slices.

The first challenge with a pie chart is that it takes up a lot of space relative to the amount of data the chart conveys. Excel 2013 Pie Charts are very common, but have three weaknesses we’ll explore and work around in Excel Video 462.

How do i make a pie chart in excel 2013