How to make a Pie Chart in Illustrator

Hello. It is time to do pie charts. An illustrator, um, the pie chart part. Okay. This part here at the top is super duper easy. Okay?

And you may asking yourself,  this video looks really long though. It's because I, I don't know, I mess around  with making it 3D and stuff. I really like missing around with that stuff. Not essential. The paragraphs are easy. I spent way too long kind of messing around with this.

What I really like about this tutorial,  after finishing it was like, oh, we got  to tie together a bunch of different techniques  and shortcuts and things in this one video to,  and it takes something and go a little bit further. So there you go. Enjoy the video. Alright, uh, to create our pie chart,  you can use existing data and just change it or start again. Okay? So if you're gonna start again, click  and hold down the column chart, find the pie chart  and just drag it out and you can get started from there.

I'm gonna convert this one we've already got,  'cause I've already got some data in it  and it's useful skill to know. So with it selected with my black arrow,  we can go to graph type. Okay? And in here we can  say, I don't want it to be a column. I'd like it to be a pie chart. Okay?

And again, you can go through  and have a look at the different options. For this one, I'm just gonna leave it as the default  and it's not gonna quite work. So with a pie chart, it needs the data  to be organized in a specific way. So let's go to graph data. Okay? For some reason it doesn't like this stacking of uh, data.

That way it wants to go left or right. And that's why this little option here says  transpose column in row. If you do that, nothing's gonna happen. But you remember what you need to do. Remember hit tick. Okay?

And it's gone  and changed it, it lost my colors and that's okay. Okay? Because we can go and update those. But that is how to make uh, pie chart. I'm gonna close down my, uh,  graph data and let's go and color it. So we should go, I'm gonna use my like direct selection tool  to grab this, just this chunk.

'cause if I grab with my black arrow,  it grabs the whole thing. Okay? But I want just this chunk. So what I can do though is use our sneaky trick. Remember select, uh, same appearance  and it's gonna grab this one  and the corresponding one over here  so you don't have to kind of work it out. Okay?

And I'm gonna say, uh, you are going to be this color  another grade Anne. Anyway, I'm gonna work my way through. Uh, I'll speed this through. Alright. Um, so I colored it. That was fun.

Um, if you are thinking, man, this is a bit cumbersome  and illustrated totally is, um, it is a tool that can do it. There are better tools to make graphs like things like Excel  or uh, max numbers or Google Sheets  or there's a plugin that I'll share  with you at the end for this. Uh, for illustrator it's, yeah,  if I'm doing a one-off annual report,  I'll probably just do it an illustrator. If I am a, I don't know, data visualization person,  that's all I do, I'll probably use something  else other than illustrator. It's just a bit tricky and cumbersome. Alright?

Um, the trick with the pie graph, like the column graph is  that you don't wanna break it apart  unless you really, really, really, really have to. There's a few things you can do. Like I can grab the direct selection tool  and grab this slice and just kind of pull it off. You know, it is still part of the graph, which is cool  'cause I can go back into the data. Okay? Graph data and say, what was that slice  Filtered coffee.

Let's put that up to uh, one 50. No, let's go to 80. That didn't work. I've got eight 80 head enter. Okay? You can see it updated and changed  even though it's kind of pulled out.

So there are things you can do with it  and sometimes you also just want to like say you want  to leave milligrams there or okay, move it around. Use the direct selection tool and move it around. It'll still be part of the graph, okay? You can still go through and change it in here  to Dans, okay? Remember to hit the tick and it will adjust. So you can kind of jiggle things  around while still being part of, you know,  the editable pie graph.

Some things you can't do wanna cut a hole in it like the  donut you saw at the beginning. Okay? If I grab my lips tool, which is the uh, what is it? The L key, okay? And I hold down the option key mac al can a  pc and I drag out a circle from the center  holding shift as well. Okay?

I can't grab both of those  and say I wanna make it a compound shape,  which is command seven. Nope, I can, I can definitely uh, add a clipping mask. It's not what I want, but let's say I wanna do um,  the command or control eight. Okay? It says you can't do it, it needs to be broken apart. And that's where you might go through  and go, okay, I'm gonna break this apart now.

And, but sometimes a little hack might work. Let's say the uh, fill color here is just gonna be white. Don't tell anyone it's not a hole, it's just white. That kind of needs to be back in there. But you get the idea. Sometimes there's just a little bit  of fudging to keep it um, connected to the data.

Alright, let's break it apart. Now I'm gonna make a duplicate of it. So I'm gonna grab you. You go sit over there. That's my good version. This one here, I'm going to select.

And do you remember, do you go  to object and hit that forever? No, you go to ungroup. Okay? And you're gonna say you're gonna break the  connection, that's fine. And I'm gonna ungroup it again. I'm using my shortcut, uh, command shift G  or control shifty on a pc.

Okay? And I now want to actually, I wanna put that back in. I should have done that at the beginning. I'm gonna go  to command Y, okay? And I'm gonna grab you  and kind of get you to wedge back in under wire again. And I want to cut a hole in this, okay?

Instead of a clipping mask, what I'm gonna do is I want  to actually destroy everything in the inside. Okay? I wanna get rid of it 'cause it looks  better when it's 3D. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to my shift  M on both Mac and pc. Hold on my option counter Mac, oh PC  and just color out the middle. Now there's a hole.

How do I know there's a hole? Ooh, remember the shortcut? Command shift D, okay? Or control shift D to go to uh, what is it called? Transparency grid. Okay, definitely a hole.

Now the next thing we need to do is I'm  gonna kind of make it 3D. What happens is it'll wrap the sides  with whatever's wrapped around the sides. So can you see there's a stroke. I'm gonna make a bigger, by  default there was a stroke given to it. So if I make this 3D, the edges  of this thing's gonna be black. You might want that.

I don't. I'm gonna select it all and say have no stroke. I'm gonna use a shortcut again. See over here. Okay, you might be thinking, does use all these shortcuts? I totally do.

I'm a bit of a shortcut nerd  and I do think they work. And if I hit the X key,  can you see over here it brings the stroke to the front And  who remembers what the give it no fill  button is down your keyboard. Okay? It's the forward slash key and it has no stroke. Alright, let's make it 3D. What we need to do is have it selected.

This chunk needs to be grouped. It does work when they're separated,  but they end up flying all over the place. So let's just select it all  and use command G for group control. G for uh, pc. And with it selected, let's go up to window  and add unnecessary 3D. Okay, we covered 3D in the essentials course.

Let's just do a basic, let's go to object. Let's go to the top here, go to extrude  and look how cool that is. Now if you've not worked with 3D very much,  it can be a little tricky to rotate this thing. You're meant to use this uh, gooey thing in the middle here. Uh, if you click  the.in the middle, it's kinda the worst part. You're like duh.

You might  eventually get it to where you need to be. What I find is the most useful is probably just using,  if you scroll down here using this, okay,  it's probably a little bit more like okay I can stand  or grab one of these edges. Okay? Either that one to go forward and back  or that one to do the rotation. Okay? And it just does one at a time, one axes at a time.

Um, yeah, either way you wanna do it. I'm gonna do the crazy line it up. Perfect and cool stuff you can still do is um,  can you still see the outline there? Okay, I can go into outline mode. So command uh, y okay and I can grab my black selection. Double click to go inside.

Okay, so it inside that group I can grab this chunk,  use my black arrow just to move it out. Okay? And then it can go command Y again and look at us. Cool 3D thing that we could label with other stuff. Double click the background to come out and command Y  or control Y for outline mode. And there we go.

We've got some 3D stuff. Now when you are doing 3D  and just we're finished bar graph stuff now and  but I want to show you like if I zoom in,  can you see mine is quite pixelated. Yours might not be your computer also might be having a  little mini meltdown with 3D. Okay, three D's tricky. And the way to make it more tricky  but also look better, there's two things with it selected. Okay?

You can go up to the 3D materials,  there's this little option  and you can turn on ray tracing, watch  what happens to it, okay? And hit render. It just comes out a whole lot nicer. What I'm gonna do is go to my materials  and there's a bunch of materials I'm gonna keep on the base  and I'm gonna go this little panel find a little bit tricky. You can scroll all the way down the bottom here. Okay?

And there's one called I like metallic. Okay, do I want it to be rough? No, I want it to be super shiny. Okay? And now if I hit render again, it'll go through  and kind of like do a really serious render. Actually a little bit of roughness.

Let's change the  lighting as well to be diffuse standard. And I'm gonna crank it up. Okay? And I'm gonna go back into here and hit render. This is kind of like a, you've kind  of got it close now hit render  and it will give it a nicer finished polished look. Mine doesn't look much different.

Good Dan, I'm gonna move my light source somewhere  where it's catching the top of this thing. There we go. Actually maybe a diffuse light. That's it. Diffuse light and I'm gonna crank it up  and then I'm gonna go to render. Mine's kind of soft.

I'm gonna lower down the softness. Let's get it to be hard. All right, I'm gonna stop messing  Around in 3D It looked cool how it started. I just wanted to remind you of like  how to get a good render. Okay? Is to come into here, turn ray tracing on,  turn the quality up to high and then hit render.

'cause by default it's not doing that, okay? It's not gonna be a good output. The other thing that can really help with the resolution,  and this is totally gonna freak your computer out, is  that if you go up to fix  and go to something called document raster settings, okay? And in here mine by default is at 72 PPI pixels per inch. Kind of like low resolution works perfectly good for  what I'm gonna be using it for, but let's say it's going out  to it annual report and I need it  to be super high, be prepared. If you click this button, it's gonna redraw it.

And depending on how old uh your  machine is, it will freak out. My machine is like I maxed out an Apple machine  and it's still quite tricky doing a simple biograph. Oh but look how tasty it looks. Come on. Okay? So if you do need more resolution  out of it, you can do that.

I totally need a shadow selected turn shadow on prepare  to freak out machine if yours is freaking out. But you really do want the 3D stuff. There is a way around it. First of all, just turning the ru of savings back to 72. Get it how you want. Then you know when you're finished  crank it up to 300, uh, PPI and that'll be fine.

The other one is, oh look at all my reflections. Lemme change my lighting just one more time. Okay, I've made mine worse. But what I wanna show you is instead of,  'cause I wanna drag this along right  and it's gonna start rendering again. What you want to be doing is turning the ruster back down  but also turning the uh,  ray tracing off until you're finished as well. 'cause otherwise it's going to keep doing this every time  you move any one of these dials anyway.

Alright, that one, let's turn it off. Hang on, jump up. Alright, so you might be able to hear it in the microphone. I don't know. The fans on my  pool, little laptop have come on. They never come on.

So Illustrator is not, it does cool. Um, 3D but it's not kind of built for it  so it can be a little bit tricky. So I'm gonna turn the ray tracing off  and then mess around with it and let you go  because we've made a paragraph way back earlier  and then we spent way too long messing around with it in 3D. Alright, I turned off my shadow. Didn't look good with it anyway. Um, last thing I wanted to share with you  before we go is if you do find yourself doing a lot more  work with, um, graphs inside  of Illustrator, there is a plugin.

This seems to be, I haven't used it. I asked a few people that I know who do do this type  of thing and they said this is the one. Okay? So, uh, data on data line, Dalon, whatever,  it's um, go check it out. They have got a plugin for Illustrator  and that might be something that you could use if you are,  you know, going further with graphs in Illustrator. Alright, my friends, uh, that is gonna be it.

I will see you in the next video.