Free Pareto Chart Maker

Read category amounts from the left axis and cumulative shares from the right. Bars sort by descending amount, except that Other stays last. Highlighting includes the first category that reaches or exceeds the chosen threshold. Turn Summary sentence on to state the result in words; its category count includes members folded into Other.

A steep early rise means a few recorded categories account for much of the chosen total. It does not establish why those events happened or how quickly a change would help. Review severity, cost, feasibility and the quality of the category definitions before deciding what to investigate.

Choose one observation period and one measure. Frequency, cost and downtime can give different rankings; do not mix them in one amount column. The 80% line is a reading aid, not proof that exactly 20% of categories produce 80% of the total.

This is synthetic data, not customer activity. In Counts, choose Paste from spreadsheet. Copy the following seven lines, from the header through Total, into the paste box:

Reason,Tickets

Wrong item,30

Missing item,7

Late dispatch,50

Label error,3

Damaged box,10

Total,100

Check that the preview reports five rows, header skipped and Total row left out, then choose Use these rows. Replace the title with "Illustrative support tickets", subtitle with "Synthetic example — 100 tickets, five categories", left axis with "Tickets", bottom axis with "Ticket reason", and summary nouns with "ticket categories" and "all tickets". Keep the right axis "Cumulative %".

Leave Other off. Choose the Clean theme, Slide and To total (classic). Keep Threshold line at 80%, with Summary sentence, Legend, Count on each bar and Cumulative % at each point on. The sorted counts should be Late dispatch 50, Wrong item 30, Damaged box 10, Missing item 7 and Label error 3. Their cumulative percentages are 50%, 80%, 90%, 97% and 100%.

The summary should read "2 of 5 ticket categories account for 80% of all tickets". Choosing 90% changes it to three of five at 90%. Grouping Under 10% folds Missing item and Label error into Other 10, placed last after Damaged box 10. Return to 80% and turn Other off for the original view, then Download PNG and inspect all five categories in the 1280 × 720 example output.

For a log with one occurrence per line, choose Raw list rather than assigning each line a count yourself. Enable First line is a header if the first entry names the column. Spelling variants that differ only in capitalization or extra spaces are combined; different words remain separate categories.

For example, five occurrences of Late dispatch, two of Wrong item and one of Damaged box give eight entries and three categories. Their exact cumulative shares are 62.5%, 87.5% and 100%; the displayed labels round to 63%, 88% and 100%. The 80% threshold is reached by the second category.

If the lines already contain a category and an amount, review Read them as counts instead of tallying each entire line as an occurrence. Edit the tally as a table transfers the counts to editable rows. After any data change, review the title, subtitle, units and summary wording: labels do not automatically describe your new dataset.

Define categories consistently before adding their amounts. Broad categories can hide useful detail, while many small categories can make the chart hard to read. Other is a display grouping, not an explanation; inspect its members, especially if it is needed to cross the threshold.

Check the input feedback and the exported file. Negative amounts and all-zero totals cannot produce a Pareto ranking. Half-filled rows or lines without usable numbers may be skipped, and a nonmatching Total row can remain as data. Crowded charts may omit overlapping labels; grouping or a wider canvas can help.

Use the fishbone diagram maker to organize possible explanations for a selected category, then gather evidence to assess them. Use the bar chart maker for a straightforward category comparison when a cumulative-share analysis is not needed.