The speedometer, meter gauge, party/seat distribution created with doughnut charts features in Excel, are dynamic scalable, accurate, and highly customizable. You will learn how to generate such charts in Excel that is completely data-driven. They offer powerful and attractive visuals to convey meanings and context.
In this post, I’ll share the progression of the charts from start to finish for different variations. At the end of this post, you’ll also get the link to download the entire workbook.
The speedometer-like gauge is great for showing a specific value and how it falls within the minimum, average, and maximum limits with full accuracy with just a hand and little to no text and description required for convey the value. To create this, we start with two sets of data: one for setting up the dial or meter, and another for the actual value to display and the pointer’s look. The datasets may look as this:
The final chart should look something like this showing 35 on the dial with a pointer:

As the Value cell is changed in the dataset, the chart updates accordingly. The chart progression looks like this through five key phases, start to finish:

This was accomplised with doughnut chart, pie chart, and multiple data series.
We can create other variations using similar techniques such as a chart as this showing a value within a meter:

The above charts show a value, in this case, a score by a student on two subjects; or, a percentage or some proportions in a much more attractive way than a bar or column chart. Creation of such chart also takes several steps and goes through five key stages as shown below:

There are can be even more variations and uses of such. For example, to show a distribution of two or more entities or items. For example, the House and Senate distribution may be shown as below (data is fictional) both in raw values or percentages or both:


The dividing lines in-between segments provide a great visual sense of progression, while the colors create a clear separator. As you can this half-circle charts can work even when the numbers don’t add up to 100, as shown in the second example where we have 260 seats occupied by one party, and 175 seats by another.
You can image many more uses for these types of charts. With some tweaking and patience, we can start with vanilla charts and produce very impactful and fancy looking charts. There are obviously many little steps, specific arrangement of data, and specific orders to creating them which require much more in-depth explanation. That’s why I have created an Excel workbook with all of these, along with step-by-step instructions for each, and with pro tips.
You can download the complete workbook and guide from here.
Happy charting!