Excel or PPT: How to have two pie charts, but one legend

Question

I would like to design a slide that shows two pie charts of the same size side-by-side, but with a single legend that is centered on the page beneath both charts. I can easily create one of the pies with a legend on the bottom, but the problem is when I delete the legend from the other pie, the pie increases in size.

1. Any ideas for accomplishing this in Excel and/or PowerPoint

2. Does anyone know of alternatives to the MS Office suite? We used to do this easily in Harvard Graphics, but it's not fully compatible with the latest Windows.

Solution

I had the same problem. Just solved it like this:

1. create both pie charts separately
2. give them their titles, but switch off the legends
3. align them as close as possible
4. make sure the box's shape outline is white
5. zoom in as much as possible and take a screenshot with both pies and titles in it then
6. take one of the two pie charts and fit it to the page size
7. switch the legend back on
8. draw a white box over the big pie
9. insert the cropped screenshot on top
10. center it manually Hope that helped.

Comments

[dav]

As a sidebar, you may want to reconsider having two pie charts for side-by-side comparison. There's a lot of info out there showing that people have a very hard time comparing angles on adjacent pie charts. You may be better suited to have side-by-side bar or column charts, or consider something like a bump chart to compare to sets of values. Here's a great example: peltiertech.com/WordPress/…