Donut chart is a variation of a Pie chart. Donut chart is more clear than a Pie chart where the size of the pie’s  does not present clear picture to the user. I will show you how to create a Donut chart in Tableau.

Pie and Donut chart are both used to display the percentage of total.

Donut chart is a pie chart with center pie being cut out so that it gives the shape of a ring or a donut.

It is created by using the Dual-axis technique, where you overlay one circle over the other and change one of the circle to white color so it appears invisible to the user.

Creating Donut chart in Tableau

Steps:

1. Connect to Tableau’s Sample – Superstore.xls. This file is located in your My repository folder. Connect to this file and create a sheet. Connect to excel datasource
2. Create a new sheet.
3. On the blank view canvas, change the Marks to “Pie”

1. Drop any measure on the Rows in the View canvas. This is just to create the Donut shape, it doesn’t matter which measure you take. For this exercise, i will take Profit. Drop Profit twice on the Rows.
2. These measures are used only to create a shape of the Donut, we will not be doing any aggregation on it. So change them to “Attribute” by clicking on the pill of both the measures

3. Click on both the measures (one by one) on the Rows and increase the size

4. Click on the second measure/Profit and change the color to “white” by using the Color card. This will make your second pie/circle disappear

5. Click on the second Profit again on the Rows and select Dual axis

6. If your first pie disappears then click on the first Profit on the Rows and increase it’s size.

This will give you the ring of the Donut

7. Click on the first Profit on the Rows and drop Sales on the Label card and Segment on the color. You can also hide the axis as you don’t need them.

Click on Sales pill and navigate to Quick Table Calculation and select “Percent of Total”. Pie chart or Donut charts are used to display the percentage of the total.

This will give you the Donut chart of Sales for various Segments.