Pareto Chart Maker

How to Use the Pareto Chart Maker

1. 1. Enter your counts. One category per line: a label, a comma, then the count — Missing DOI or URL, 46. Order does not matter; the tool sorts the bars. A table pasted from a spreadsheet works as it is; with decimal commas, separate cells with semicolons. A label that appears twice is added together.
2. 2. Combine the small categories if you wish. Keep the largest N or Combine those under N% folds the rest into one bar called “Other”, always drawn last. It takes at least two categories to make an “Other”.
3. 3. Read the result. The cards give the total and how many categories it takes to reach 80%. The shaded bars are those categories; the dashed line is the 80% mark on the right-hand axis.
4. 4. Label it and export. Add the title and axis titles, pick the bar color and turn on APA style figure for a paper. Download the SVG (sharp at any size) or a PNG 1,280 pixels wide.

What a Pareto Chart Shows

A Pareto chart is a bar chart with two jobs. The sorted bars show which categories are biggest; the line, which adds the bars up from the left as a share of the whole, shows how quickly the total builds. Where the line crosses the 80% mark tells you how many categories — the “vital few” — account for most of the total. It is a tool for deciding where to look first: which kinds of error, complaint, defect or cost deserve attention, and which are the trivial many.

The idea is named for the economist Vilfredo Pareto, and the quality engineer Joseph Juran popularized it as “the vital few and the trivial many”. It fits any additive, non-negative measure — counts of errors by type, hours lost by cause, cost by line item, citations by journal — as long as the categories do not overlap, so each item counts once.

How the Chart Is Drawn

• The left axis runs from 0 to the total, not to the tallest bar. The top of the plot is then both the total on the left and 100% on the right, so a bar's height is its true share of the whole and the 80% line is exactly level. The cost is that the bars of a long list look short.
• “Other” goes last, whatever its size. The named categories stay in descending order, and the combined bar closes the list. If “Other” is the tallest bar, you have split the data too finely — use fewer, broader categories.
• Ties keep the order you entered them in. The shaded bars run up to and including the first one at which the line reaches 80%, so they always cover at least 80% of the total.
• Negative values and non-numbers are left out. A negative count cannot be part of a whole, and the tool tells you how many it skipped.

Honest Limits of the 80/20 Rule

The “80/20 rule” is a rule of thumb, not a law. Plenty of data are flatter — ten categories of near-equal size reach 80% only at the eighth — and some are steeper. Report the figure your own data give, not 80/20 because it is familiar. A Pareto chart also ranks frequency, not importance: the commonest error may be trivial and a rare one serious. If severity matters, chart a measure that includes it, such as cost or hours, or weight the counts before you paste them.

Putting a Pareto Chart in an APA 7 Paper

APA style keeps the figure number and title in the paper's text. APA style figure removes the title from the image, draws the axes dark with no gridlines, and sets the number in bold and the title in italic title case above the chart; Copy number and title copies both. Say in the Note. what was counted and over what — Counts of errors found in 40 student bibliographies — and which line is the dashed one. See APA's figure setup guidelines. Bars and line use different Okabe–Ito colors, and the line carries markers, so the figure still reads in grayscale.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Pareto chart?

A Pareto chart combines a bar chart sorted from largest to smallest with a line showing the cumulative percentage of the total. It is used to separate the few categories that account for most of a problem — errors, defects, complaints, costs — from the many that account for little, so that effort goes where it will matter.

What does the 80% line on a Pareto chart mean?

It marks where the cumulative percentage reaches 80% of the total; the categories to the left of the point where the cumulative line crosses it make up that 80%. The number comes from the Pareto principle, a rule of thumb — your data may reach 80% sooner or later, and the chart shows which. In the example, five of eight categories do.

Why is the “Other” bar last even when it is taller than the rest?

By convention “Other” closes the list, so the named categories remain in descending order and the cumulative line still reads left to right. If “Other” is bigger than your largest named category, that is a sign the categories are too fine — merge some of them into broader groups, or raise the number you keep.

Can I use costs or hours instead of counts?

Yes. Any non-negative number that adds up to a meaningful total works — dollars lost, minutes of delay, words per section. Charting cost rather than frequency often changes the order, and is the usual way to rank problems by how much they matter rather than how often they occur. Averages and rates do not add up, so do not chart them here.

When should I not use a Pareto chart?

Do not use it for measurements that are not parts of a whole — averages, percentages that do not sum to 100%, scores — or for categories that overlap, such as survey answers where people could tick several boxes. Do not use it for categories with a natural order, such as age bands or months; a bar graph or histogram keeps that order. With fewer than four or five categories the cumulative line adds little.