Please don't use pie charts

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/08/please-dont-use-pie-charts.html

by jgrahamc • 17 years ago

60 19 17 years ago

jgc.org

tokenadult• 17 years ago

See Tufte's forum for a discussion:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

antipax• 17 years ago

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

dpcan• 17 years ago

If there are only 2 wedges it works pretty well.

pavel_lishin• 17 years ago

"Percentage of chart which resembles Pac-man."

mrtron• 17 years ago

Percentage of chart which resembles Mr T.

sound2man• 17 years ago

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.

dlsspy• 17 years ago

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.

chanux2• 17 years ago

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

kristiandupont2• 17 years ago

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.

olavk• 17 years ago

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.

chanux2• 17 years ago

Well.. I do not disagree with you.

But the article, which my comment is for, says "Please don't use pie charts" which is not the right idea OR the heading is too sensational for HN IMHO.

mixmax• 17 years ago

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.

kristiandupont2• 17 years ago

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.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

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

jnovek• 17 years ago

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.

Semiapies• 17 years ago

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.

elecengin• 17 years ago

"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...

kingkilr• 17 years ago

For displaying this kind of data I've recently been shown: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/accessibledatavisualizati... 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.

raquo• 17 years ago

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).

Please don't use pie charts

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