The sunburst chart is very useful to visualize the hierarchy and the proportion of your data in Excel.

Create a sunburst chart

The sunburst chart is part of the hierarchical chart family. It allows you to see at a glance the number of hierarchical levels that exist and the proportion that each segment represents.

Creating a sunburst chart is something very simple to do. But you must respect these rules:

• Your columns must respect the hierarchy between your data
• The last column has numbers for the representation of the sections.

To illustrate how to create a sunburst chart, we will extract the list of all the files contained in a folder and the subfolders of our computer.

As you can see in the image, each hierarchical level is distinctly viewable in different columns. The last column shows the size of each file. Without this column, Excel cannot represent the size of each section.

1. Select one of the cells in your data table.
2. Go to the menu Insert> Hierarchical graph> Sunburst

Immediately, the sunburst chart is added to your worksheet.

How to read a sunburst chart?

• First, you have to start from the center of the chart. The center represents the first level of the hierarchy (in our example, the root folder).
• Each subfolder of the first level has its own color.
• The folders are ordered by size. This rule is valid for each level.
• Finally, you can easily know the deep of a folder by visualizing the number of levels.

Detail of a level

1. Here, the folder Essec has 4 sub-directories. VBA is the first one
2. The VBA directory represents the largest volume of data.
3. Then, the VBA folder has also sublevels.
4. The Exam folder represents almost the entire volume of files in the VBA folder.
5. The Exam folder contains other sub-directories among which the Result directory is the largest.

Representation of the organization chart of a company

This chart is also very useful for visualizing the hierarchical levels in a company or an organization. We can easily represent the number of employees linked to a manager or a department.

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