

Please don't use pie charts - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/08/please-dont-use-pie-charts.html

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antipax
Thought the exact same thing about that Word pie chart when I read the "death
of word" article before.

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mixmax
Somewhat related: Don't use colors that are similar. I'm red-green colorblind
and have great difficulty distinguishing some of the colors in the word chart.
It's a very common mistake, that affects a large percentage of the population.
Around 10% of the male population suffers from red-green colorblindness.

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kristiandupont
I am not colorblind, I just couldn't be bothered with that graph. The
gradients look cool for sure, but combined with the similar colors, they make
it close to impossible to decipher.

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jnovek
Counterexample:

I, personally, am in love with the "Trends" pie chart on mint.com. It allows
you to drill down and expand each wedge of the pie into its sub-components. I
feel like this would be much less meaningful if it were expressed as, say, a
bar graph.

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tokenadult
See Tufte's forum for a discussion:

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=00018S)

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nazgulnarsil
pie charts are for zero sum topics ONLY, where the gain in one would be a
direct loss of the other.

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elecengin
"But if you still must use pie charts, I beg you not to use 3D pie charts.
Please, they are simply an abomination. Making them 3D just makes them even
harder to interpret."

I agree! I never understood why a pie chart (with the principal value of
showing the relative size of each chunk compared to the others) would be
rotated and distorted in such a way to make the relative sizes indiscernible.

Pie charts have such limited value... I wonder if part of the reason they
became so popular was how simple it is to draw one - if you have a protractor,
pencil, and a calculator, it is a very quick process. When you are no longer
limited by drawing time, though, there seems to be very little worthwhile in
the design. I wish they never made the transition to the computing age...

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kingkilr
For displaying this kind of data I've recently been shown:
[http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibledatavisualizati...](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibledatavisualization/)
and I'm 100% convinced. Plus Wilson Miner provides such nice and simple
HTML+CSS even people who are bad at design like me can work with it and have
something good looking.

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dpcan
If there are only 2 wedges it works pretty well.

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pavel_lishin
"Percentage of chart which resembles Pac-man."

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mrtron
Percentage of chart which resembles Mr T.

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Semiapies
The article makes good points, but I really haven't come across all that many
such badly-executed or badly-conceived pie charts. Admittedly, that might be
like the way I don't personally happen to come across a lot of hand-made signs
with quotation marks used as emphasis, but they're definitely out there.

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dlsspy
Wow. I'm so glad someone posted this. I generally hate pie charts, but I spent
a while trying to figure out what that chart was actually telling me before my
"I actually really don't care" sensibility kicked in.

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chanux
The whole thing boils down to "Use right tool for right task."

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kristiandupont
I don't know. It kind of bothers me when people says that - it usually comes
up when discussing programming languages.

Yes, of course you should use the right tool. You could also say that it boils
down even further to something like "don't be stupid". The fact that some
abstraction covers a point doesn't mean that said point has no value in and of
itself.

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olavk
Agreed. The interesting point is always _when_ is X the right tool for the
job.

Pie charts is a good tool when you want to show the _relative_ sizes of (a
small number of) unordered data points. It is a bad tool for displaying Word
features introduced per version, since it is not really interesting to see how
many features were introduced in Word 2.0 _relative_ to Word 95. (Never mind
that "number of features" is pretty hard to quantify.)

A pie chart would be interesting to show e.g. the market share of Word
compared to OpenOffice.

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raquo
If your primary goal is to compare several items, make a bar chart. If you
want to show a composition of something, make it a pie chart (And make it
hollow).

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sound2man
I like pie charts, possibly because i like pie. True they may not be a very
accurate representation of a large number of variables, but for a quick
overview of a couple figures it works pretty good.

