Let’s create a very simple pie chart using the Python library matplotlib. I will jump right into the basic code. I’m using Anaconda Navigator’s Jupyter Notebook on my local Windows machine.

# imort matplotlib's pyplot
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Let’s build a simple pie chart.

plt.style.use("fivethirtyeight")
plt.title("My Nice Pie Chart")
plt.tight_layout()
slices = [75,25]
labels = ['seventy-five','twenty-five']
plt.pie(slices, labels=labels)
plt.show()

Here is a screenshot.

Let’s change the data and add borders between the slices. We’ll also change the colors. It’s nice to have colors that are not as intense. I also changed the title to suptitle because I got an error that said: “TypeError: ‘str’ object is not callable”. StackOverflow helped with this.

# Colors: (Just some random hex colors here)
Blue = '#008fd5'
Red = '#F8927B'
Yellow = '#EEF0A3'
Green = '#A3F0AB'
slices = [35,30, 25, 10]
labels = ['35','30','25','10']
colors = ['blue', Red, Green, '#EEF0A3']
plt.suptitle("Four Slices of Pie")
plt.pie(slices, labels=labels, colors=colors, wedgeprops={'edgecolor': 'black'})
plt.show()

Here is the screenshot.

Manually Created DataFrame – Pie Chart with Explode

Let’s create a small DataFrame and create a pie chart from the data.

import pandas as pd
# manually create a new DataFrame
data = {'name': ['Bob', 'Sally', 'Suzie', 'Rohan'],
       'num': [12, 67, 33, 41]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)
# create a percentage column (new column)
total = df['num'].sum()
df['percentage'] = ((df['num'] / total) * 100).round(2)
df['percentage'].sum()

Below is our current DataFrame.

Let’s create and show a pie chart. I have brought back the colors in the code.

# Create and show a pie chart
explode = [0, 0, 0.1, 0]
slices = list(df['percentage'])   # list() function
labels = list(df['name'])
Blue = '#008fd5'; Red = '#F8927B';  Green = '#A3F0AB'; Yellow = '#EEF0A3' # random hex colors here
colors = ['blue', Red, Green, '#EEF0A3']  # blue is not a hex color here
plt.style.use("fivethirtyeight")
plt.suptitle("My Friends Pie Chart")  # title may throw an error
plt.tight_layout()
plt.pie(slices, labels=labels, explode=explode, shadow=True, colors=colors, autopct='%1.1f%%', wedgeprops={'edgecolor': 'white'})
plt.show()

Here below is the screenshot.