Pie Chart in MATLAB (original) (raw)

Last Updated : 23 Jul, 2025

A Pie chart is a circular graph that is divided into sections and each section represents the proportionate part of the whole. In MATLAB we have a function named **pie() which allows us to plot a bar graph.

**Syntax:

_pie(X)

_pie(X) draws a pie chart using the data in X. Each slice of the pie chart represents an element in X.

• Where the _sum(X) ≤ 1, then the areas of the pie slices directly specify the values in X pie draws only a partial pie if sum(X) < 1.
• Where the sum(X) > 1, then the area of each slice of the pie is determined by pie normalizes the values by X/sum(X)
• Here let X be a categorical data type, the slices correspond to categories. The number of elements in the category divided by the number of elements in X becomes The area of each slice.

Now let's move to some examples.

**Example 1: A simple pie chart:

MATLAB `

% data b= [20 30 40 30]

% pie function to draw pie chart pie(b)

`

**Output :

fig 1: Pie chart

**Example 2: Pie chart with offset:

MATLAB `

% data b= [20 30 40 30] % offset first and third by using 1 at explode explode = [1 0 1 0]

% pie function to draw pie chart with % explode 1st and 3rd position data pie(b,explode)

`

**Output :

fig 2: Pie chart with offset

**Example 3: Pie chart with labels:

MATLAB `

% data b= [20 30 40 30]

% labelling on Pie chart labels={'a','b','c','d'}

% pie function to draw pie chart with labels pie(b,labels)

`

**Output :

fig 3: Pie chart with labels

**Example 4: Partial Pie chart:

MATLAB `

% create vector whose sum is less than 1 b= [0.2 0.4 0.1]

% pie function to draw pie chart pie(b)

`

**Output :

fig 4: Partial Pie chart

**Example 5: Compare 2 pie charts:

MATLAB `

% data b= [20 30 40 30] a= [10 40 20 20]

% labelling on pie chart labels={'a','b','c','d'}

% to add more than 1 plot in same figure t = tiledlayout(1,2,'TileSpacing','compact');

% create pie charts ax1 = nexttile; pie(ax1,a) title('Pie chart 1') ax2 = nexttile; pie(ax2,b) title('Pie chart 2')

% create legend and put labels as arguments lgd = legend(labels); % position of legend there are 4 positions %'north','south','east','west' lgd.Layout.Tile = 'north';

`

**Output :

fig 5: Comparison of 2 pie charts