My reply is a little off topic so forgive me, please

A pie chart with 40 categories is unreadable; even 10 is to much
All the graph experts (Edward Tuffe, Stephen Few, etc) are very disparaging
of pi charts; the eye has difficulty comparing angles. Why not use a Column
chart?

As for the wide range of values; have you considered a logarithmic scale? In
Excel 2007 you can have not just logs to base 10, but to any other base --
base 2 is often a good choice.

To answer your question: filter the data to hide the low values and chart
what remains

best wishes
--
Bernard V Liengme
Microsoft Excel MVP
http://people.stfx.ca/bliengme
remove caps from email


"Thomas M." wrote in message
...
Excel 2007

Basic Question
----------------
Is there a way to make a pie chart ignore "empty" cells? Note that the
cells are not truly empty. The display of data in the cells has simply
been "blanked" out using this formula: =IF(B19<1000,"",B19)

More Information
------------------
I'm putting together a pie chart that will be updated monthly. There are
40 categories of data, and the values for those categories range from 1 ot
65,000. Obviously, this presents a problem in that the categories with
low values will be shown as pie slices so thin as to be basically
imperceptible. To solve this problem, I'd like to take all the categories
where the value is less than 1,000 and sum them up into one category
called Other. I would then like to include the Other category on the pie
chart along with all the individual categories that have values greater
than 1,000.

An additional complicating factor is that the number of categories with
values greater than 1,000 will vary from month to month. This month,
there are 15 categories with values exceeding 1,000, but next month there
could be more of those categories, or less.

In an attempt to solve these two problems I've done the following:

1) At the bottom of the list of categories I've created an Other category.
The value is determined by
=SUMIF(B3:B43,"<1000"), which gives me the sum of all the categories
having values less than 1,000.

2) I created a calculated column that shows the category names only when
the value for the category 1,000.

3) I created a calculated column that shows the value of the category only
when the value is 1,000.

This gives me two columns that show the category names and values for just
those categories where the value is greater than 1,000. I then built my
chart using the two calculated columns, hoping that the rows which don't
display data would be ignored. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work
that way. What I ended up with is a chart that shows blank items in the
legend.

How can I make it so that the chart shows only the categories where the
value is greater than 1,000, plus the Other category, and not show blank
items in the legend?

--Tom