Pareto chart builder
Enter your causes with their frequency (or cost), and the ordering and the 80% cut-off are calculated for you.
Enter your own causes and their frequency (or cost). The table re-sorts itself from highest to lowest and highlights in indigo the vital few: the first rows whose cumulative total already explains 80% of the total.
| Cause | Frequency | % | Cum. % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 80.0% | 80.0% | |||
| 10.0% | 90.0% | |||
| 5.0% | 95.0% | |||
| 5.0% | 100.0% |
How it works
You enter causes with their frequency (or their cost). The tool:
- sorts the causes from highest to lowest,
- calculates the percentage of each one and the cumulative percentage,
- marks as vital few the rows up to the one that makes the cumulative total cross 80%.
Without data, no row is marked. The 80/20 rule is approximate: what is useful is seeing that a few causes concentrate most of the effect and knowing where to put the effort. It is best to measure all causes in the same unit and, if possible, to weight by cost and not just by number of events.
If you prefer to work in Excel, there is a Pareto spreadsheet in Excel with these same calculations.
Sources
These are the ones from the article where the theory behind this tool is developed.
Where does the 80/20 rule come from, and is there a complete real case? It is in the article Pareto chart: prioritizing the 20% of causes that explain 80% of the problem.