How to Explode a Pie 🥧 Chart in Excel

In this lesson, you will learn a few tricks for pie charting. You will know how to explode single slices out of a pie chart in Excel.

In Excel, you can explode one, several, or all the slices of a pie chart. Here are examples of how this might look like a pie chart in Excel:

Excel example pie chart

Excel pie chart explosion

 

Excel pie chart slices explosion

Pie Chart Explosion

Pie Chart Exploded

The first way (pulling by mouse)

To explode a single slice of the pie together, select it and drag and drop it off of the chart.

Pie Chart Slice Explosion

To pull all the slices of the pie together, select all of the slices and drag and drop them.

Pie Chart Slices Drag and Drop

To restore the default, select all the slices. Use the drag and drop method to pull them to the center of the pie chart.

Pie Chart Restore Explosion

The second way (by the Format Data Point menu)

You can also explode a slice out of a pie chart the other way. Just right-click the pie chart and select Format Data Point.

Pie Chart Format Data Point Explosion

 

You can set up the Point Explosion here. The higher the percentage, the farther from the center of the pie chart it appears.

Pie Chart Format Point Explosion

This is how you explode slices of a pie chart in Excel. This can be a useful technique when you want to emphasize a particular data point in your chart, helping you to communicate your data more effectively.

Further reading: 
How to create a chart with grouped data?
Dynamic chart title from the cell