How to Create a Donut Chart in Tableau

Donut charts are a great alternative to pie charts as they offer a cleaner visual layout, creating a useful white space in the center that can be used to display key insights, totals or additional context. Since Tableau doesn’t have a built-in donut chart type, I’ll walk you through a trick to manually create one by layering two pie charts over each other.

Tip: When working with more than 2-3 categories, consider using a bar chart instead. As it provides a clearer way to present and compare values side by side.

Build a Pie Chart

The first step to creating a donut chart is to create a pie chart.

1. In the Marks card, change the mark type to ‘Pie’
2. Drag the dimension you want to visualize onto the Colour shelf (e.g. Category)
3. Drag the measure you want to compare onto the Angle shelf (e.g. Sales)

 

Create the Dual Axis

Now that we have a pie chart. We will create a dual axis to layer two identical pie charts on top of each other.

1. Double click in the columns shelf to create a calculation
2. Type ‘1’ and press enter
3. Repeat the process again. Or hold ctrl, then click and drag the existing SUM(1) calculation to duplicate it
4. Right click on the second SUM(1) pill and select ‘Dual Axis’

Remove Axis headers and Grid Line

With both pie charts now layered over each other. We want to tidy up the view by removing the axis headers and grid line.

1. Right click on an axis header
2. Uncheck ‘Show Header’
3. Repeat for both axes
4. Right click anywhere on the sheet
5. Select format
6. In the format pane, select the Lines tab
7. Under Columns, set Grid lines to none

Create the Inner Circle

In the marks card, we should have three layers: All, SUM(1), and SUM(1)(2). We are going to change SUM(1)(2) to create the center of the donut chart by setting its colour to match the background.

1. In the Marks card select SUM(1)(2)
2. Remove ‘Category’ from colour. This should turn the pie chart into a grey circle.
3. Set the colour to match your worksheet background colour
4. Reduce the size of the shape to make the inner circle smaller

 

 

Add Labels

The final step is to add labels to your Donut Chart. To show the category values and to make use of the white space in the center of the donut.

1. In the Marks card, select SUM(1)
2. Drag your measure onto the label shelf (e.g. ‘Sales’)
3. Select SUM(1)(2) in the Marks card
4. Drag your field onto Label e.g. ‘Sales’
5. Resize and format labels as you wish to fit the style of your dashboard

And that’s it. You’ve successfully built a donut chart in Tableau.