Calculating & Displaying Percentages of Totals

The video shows that you can calculate the percentage of a total by dividing one number by the total and converting the cell to a percentage. A common extension would be to display percentages in a pie chart.

A pie chart requires all its slices to be defined separately so, in the above video, you would require a cell containing 'not leads' as well as a cell containing 'leads'. Excel does not then need the percentages of the total calculated in the Excel sheet as it can calculate those when drawing the chart. You would then have the choice of labelling the chart with either the absolute number of leads/not leads on the chart's slices, or Excel's calculated percentages of both.

To add a cell containing 'not leads' or negative responses, you would need to subtract the number of leads from the total number of enquiries. This can be done with the formula A1-B1 in the video to give 212. A common mistake in calculating percentages of a total can arise when a spreadsheet only contains the number of positive and negative responses, in this case 44 and 212. It is not correct to divide 44 by 212, instead you need to add the different responses together to get a total and use that as the divisor.

As you need leads/not leads to create a pie chart, and leads/enquiries to calculate the percentage of leads on an Excel sheet, it is a potential source of error in an AI created spreadsheet that gets re-purposed.