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Written by John
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Wednesday, 22 August 2007 |
I just read an article by Stephen Few about the effectiveness of pie charts. I had known from other sources that pie charts were not as effective at representing information as other means.
Edward Tufte put it well in his book, Visual Display of Quantitative Information:
the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them. PowerPoint presentations seem to be littered with pie charts. I believe that people use them because they appear to be less cluttered than the alternatives. This does not have to be the case, but does require editing the default graph layout from your charting software.
Stephen's article not only tells us that pie charts are ineffective in most situations, but also goes on to illustrate why, with excellent examples.
In his wonderful book, Show me the Numbers, Stephen goes as far as saying "I don't use pie charts." Get a copy of his book and find out what graph you should be using instead. Always ask yourself what you are trying to convey with this graph. Stephen puts it very well in his article:
Graphs are useful when a picture of the data makes meaningful relationships visible (patterns, trends, and exceptions) that could not be easily discerned from a table of the same data. I prefer cake anyway.
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