Sort causes and find the vital few.
Use it to decide which problem to attack first. Paste categories and counts, and it sorts them, draws the cumulative line and marks the vital few that make up 80% of the total.
Paste two columns from Excel. The chart sorts itself.
Vital few are the categories that together make up the first 80% of the total, including the one that crosses 80%.
A Pareto chart sorts categories from largest to smallest and adds a cumulative percentage line, showing which few causes create most of the problem (the 80/20 rule).
A month of scrap shows 9 defect types. Three of them (burrs, wrong length, scratches) account for 78% of scrapped parts, so the improvement team starts there rather than spreading effort across all nine.
The observation that roughly 80% of effects come from about 20% of causes. The exact split varies, but the vital few usually dominate.
Use whatever matters most to the business. A rare but expensive defect may rank first by cost but last by count.
Signed-in users can export the chart and data from this tool to an Excel file ready to update.