Offset Pie Slice with Greatest Contribution

This example shows how to create a pie graph and automatically offset the pie slice with the greatest contribution.

Set up a three-column array, X, so that each column contains yearly sales data for a specific product over a 5-year period.

X = [19.3, 22.1, 51.6
     34.2, 70.3, 82.4
     61.4, 82.9, 90.8
     50.5, 54.9, 59.1
     29.4, 36.3, 47.0];

Calculate the total sales for each product over the 5-year period by taking the sum of each column. Store the results in product_totals.

product_totals = sum(X);

Use the max function to find the largest element in product_totals and return the index of this element, ind.

[c,ind] = max(product_totals);

Use the pie function input argument, explode, to offset a pie slice. The explode argument is a vector of zero and nonzero values where the nonzero values indicate the slices to offset. Initialize explode as a three-element vector of zeros.

explode = zeros(1,3);

Use the index of the maximum element in product_totals to set the corresponding explode element to 1.

explode(ind) = 1;

Create a pie chart of the sales totals for each product and offset the pie slice for the product with the largest total sales.

figure
pie(product_totals,explode)
title('Sales Contributions of Three Products')