Part of a whole

Doughnut / donut chart

Shows parts of a whole as sectors of a ring with an empty centre.

What it answers

What are the shares of a whole?

The question

Where does Skye Ascent Ltd’s revenue come from?

Skye Ascent Ltd 2025 revenue of GBP 64.2 million: shared launch seats 61%; dedicated launches 27%; mission services 12%.

Skye Ascent Ltd is a fictional company created for Insyt.

Same question, drawn badly

Customers: farms 80%; insurers 6%; local government 10%; data 4%. (The revenue donut would be: 32%; 41%; 15%; 12%.)

What goes wrong. Comparing arcs across two donuts is hard. The 100% stacked bar in VZ-005 shows the same comparison on one baseline.

A small number of part-to-whole categories.

Many slices or comparing several nearly equal shares.

Read segment labels around the ring; the centre may show the total.

Layout: Long table
Fields: Category: text; Value: nonnegative number
One row is: One component of a defined whole. What is the grain?
Rules: Use mutually meaningful components and a positive total. Values may be counts or shares. Check rounded percentages.
Optional: Series or Parent for multiple wholes. Do not mix totals with their components.
Preparation: Check nonnegative components, reconcile the represented whole and aggregate duplicate categories. Define whether records are counts or already normalised shares.
Units: Each ring's percentage denominator is its defined whole; centre labels need a separate metric definition.

A long table: one row per observation, few columns. New data adds rows.

Values 32,40,28 form a ring. B occupies 40% of it; the empty centre carries no additional data unless labelled.