Percentage rounding error in charts

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

I am making a pie chart from a table of numbers where the sections of the pie
represent percentage of total. The numbers are rounding incorrectly on the
pie chart. For example, 74.7% is rounding to 74%, not 75%. How can I correct
this?
 
I can't reproduce this - does the label indicate 74.7% if you set the
number of decimal places to 1?
 
Yes it does indicate 74.7% if set to a decimal of 1. Also when you are in the
dialog box selecting the number of decimal places as 0, under the sample
illustration it will say 75%. However when you exit the dialog and view the
chart, it says 74%.
 
Excel rounds percentages on a pie chart such that they are integers that
add to 100%. Depending on the areas of the other slices, that may
require at least one percentage to round in a nonstandard way. For
instance if the areas were

74.7%
5.8%
5.8%
13.7%

then normal rounding to integer percents would sum to 101% rather than
100%. Excel must then round one of the numbers down so that the total
is 100%. The best one to round down in this case would be 74.7%,
because that choice would result in the smallest relative error.

Jerry
 
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