Creating Goal Charts In Mac Numbers

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to build a goal chart in numbers. So a goal chart would be a graphic that shows your progress on the way to a goal. Like if you're trying to raise some money it shows you how close you are to that goal or maybe you're trying to use it to track exercise or some other habit. So let's start completely from scratch in numbers with a blank template document here and I'm going to create something simple to track a goal. Let's say we have date, name, and amount to track donations and those are the only three columns that we need. So you may have something like a date like that and a name and then say an amount like that. I'm not going to bother to fill in the rest of the dates or names it's only the amounts that matter. So let's say we've got a bunch of different numbers here and then let's name this table donations and this is the table we're going to use to just track the donations. We may be doing that anyway. Now we want to create a chart that's going to take the total from this amount column and compare that to a goal. So let's create a utility table where we do those calculations. I'm going to create a new table here and I'm just going to pick the basic table like this but I'm not going to need this header row here. So under format table I'm going to set the number of header rows to zero and I'm going to shrink this down and we'll call this calculations and then the first thing we want to have here isn't actually a calculation it's the goal. So let's say the goal is $1,000 and now let's do the calculation of the total so far. So that's going to be a formula. I'm going to press the equals key to start typing a formula. I'm going to use sum, left parenthesis, and then just click here at the header C for this entire column to be included and right parenthesis and now I get the total there. Now I want to figure out how much is left and that's really simple. That's just a formula that is the goal then minus the total so far and there we go and that's all we're going to need right here. So we can now create a chart that takes the total and the remainder and charts the two of them. Let's do it first in a pie chart because that's very simple. I'm going to click here for chart, choose a pie chart, and then I'm going to click add chart data. Now I don't want to add the goal that's not part of it that's the total of everything. I want to add the amount we've collected so far and the remainder so I'm going to select just those two values right there. Now you can see here it shows me that that's 100% that's because it is plotting each column as a series. I wanted to plot each row as a series so by clicking on the colored dot there I can change to plot rows as a series and you can see I get the total and the remainder here. That looks pretty good but it doesn't really give us the aesthetic that we want to have a goal chart. To do that we're going to have to go to the sidebar here so with that selected under format chart what we're going to want to do is change each of these wedges to be something a little bit better. We're going to click on the wedge that represents the remainder and we want to make that kind of invisible. Let's first get rid of the values right here and then we're going go to style and we can simply change the color to white if we like or we could click on the color wheel here and select you know any color we want but set the opacity down to zero. However another way to do it that doesn't make the pie chart look odd is to change to be a lighter version of the same color. So we'll do a light blue for this wedge. For this wedge we'll do a dark blue and now it looks like the pie is basically blue and we're filling in this section to make it darker. We could also go to format wedge right here and we could decide whether or not we want the values to be shown what we want the values to look like so instead of percentage we could have same as source or we could say currency and then let's take away the two decimal places like that. We could also change distance from center here to have this be more centered inside the wedge or have it be outside the wedge like that and now we've got something that actually works pretty well. Let's go back to chart here let's get rid of the legend we don't need that but we could certainly add a title if we wanted to or a caption that might be nice. If we were to add another donation to this like let's go down here put another row in and say somebody gave a hundred dollars we could see how this automatically changes to fill in a little bit better. Now overshooting the goal could be kind of an issue like let's add another donation for $500 here and you can see it doesn't look right when we overshoot the goal we get a negative value for this so we could either take the total the formula here and surround that with a min function here where it's the minimum of the total or 1000 or actually we could just put a link to the goal there so this number will actually never get higher than the goal so it stays at a thousand even though this total here is above a thousand or we could go to the remainder here and we could set a maximum here for the remainder or zero so it never goes below zero so that way you do get the right number in here and if you're relying on this number you get the right number there as well but the chart will always look okay. If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support macmost at patreon you get exclusive content course discounts and more you can read about it at macmost.com slash patreon now there are lots of variations for this you can select each wedge and you could change the properties of the wedge and the style of each wedge so you can really make this look like anything you want as long as it's just a pie chart but what if we wanted something a little different we could have also created a donut chart here since a pie chart and a donut chart are essentially the same thing we can actually select this pie chart here and under format chart change it to be a donut like that we could have just started with donut so now that we've got a donut chart here there's some other things we may want to change about it like we go to format segments we might want to change the rotation angle so the chart starts at a different spot like that or that we also probably want to select the individual segments here and be a little more careful about the distance from center either having it right inside like that or to the right or left of it but another thing we want to do with a donut chart is actually not have it be a complete circle we can add another row to this i'll just call this fill and i'm going to make the fill also 1000 like that and then i'm going to edit the data references to include that fill value as well so now the actual amount and the remainder only take up half the space i can select this wedge here and i can set its style to white or zero percent opacity if i wanted to and then i could select the entire chart here go to format segments and then change the rotation angle to 180 degrees now you're kind of filling up this curve here instead of a circle and let's set for this wedge here let's turn off the value so we don't see that 50 there but now let's try a different type of chart you may want to have this be kind of just a bar that fills up or a thermometer so you can do that using a stacked column which is this one right here select that and then add chart data and then select the same two numbers here the total and the remainder like that what you're going to get is two bars next to each other but if you change so it plots rows as a series then it's going to put one bar on top of the other bar so now we can select this part of the bar here and just like before we can change its style to white or to none we could change this one as well i like the idea of making this darker and making this one a lighter version of the color like that let me just go and select the entire chart here again and let's go into axis and for the y-axis let's just have one major step so i just get the total right there let's turn off show minimum value let's have the major guidelines turned off and then for the x value we'll turn off the axis line to get rid that one there at the bottom but it's also of category labels here set to none and then even if we want we can just have the value label turned off completely so now this is just a bar like that let's get rid of the legend there so it's just a bar and we can shrink this like that now you may want to have a border around this and if i turn on the border you can see there's a gap on either end but you've got that right here gaps between columns let's set that to zero and now we've got a border around here we can make it a little darker border and now we don't even need to have this filled in if we don't want to we can change the style for this to just be white like that so now we've got a nice bar like this and now you can see if you add or change one of these values you know it fills up just like the pie chart another nice look for this would be say to turn off the border let's go to this particular series here and set its style back to a light version of the color and under chart you can turn on rounded corners like this around the corners you can even have outside corners like that so it becomes more kind of a thermometer kind of graphic there you also could change to a 3d stacked column 3d stacked bar and yes there are 3d pie charts as well so a 3d stacked column will make it look like this and now you have a 3d graphic here let's go ahead and change the colors up a bit you've got the nice shadow here you've got lighting styles all sorts of things that you could change to make this look even better even you can switch from bar shape to cylinder as well and you can move this around so lots of cool things you can do as you can see there are tons of different settings so if you really want to explore this take the time to work with each setting to see what different results you can get hope you found this useful thanks for watching