Comments on: How Succinctly Can I Explain Why Pie Charts Are Evil?

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homepage — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:04:23 +0000

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[...]How Succinctly Can I Explain Why Pie Charts Are Evil? | Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson[...]…

By: Management Improvement Carnival #143 » Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:30:07 +0000

[...] How Succinctly Can I Explain Why Pie Charts Are Evil? by Tim Wilson – “That’s a fundamental challenge with pie charts — we don’t do a very good job of comparing the areas of these odd sorta-triangular-but-with-one-curved-side shapes. In the case of the bar chart, all you have to compare is lengths — much easier.” [...]

By: Numbers Lain

Numbers Lain — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 13:39:59 +0000

google evil

By: Neal

Neal — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:54:23 +0000

Tim, just found your blog and wanted to start by saying thank you for succinctly describing why pie charts don’t work well for conveying true meaning of data relationships. I have often tried to have the same argument with people I work with and usually take way to long to get to the point if we ever get there. Your point about color blindness resonates as I often struggle to read pie charts that don’t use a color-blind friendly color pallette. The same point applies to other types of charts as well. I found a great resource to help convey this message at http://jfly.nibb.ac.jp/html/color_blind/.

I also agree with Naomi that having the x-axis really helps clarify scale is proportionate and removing the percentage signs takes out some of the visual clutter.

By: Columbus Web Analytics Wednesday — Feedback Analysis | Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:08:46 +0000

[...] data above works okay, I think, but it also is a good exercise in showing one of the reasons that pie charts are evil. The number inside each circle shows how many respondents had answers that fell in both categories. [...]

By: Naomi B. Robbins

Naomi B. Robbins — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:36:46 +0000

Many times when I see a graph without an axis, I take out my ruler and measure. I’m shocked at how often the graph is not drawn to scale, especially in some corporate annual reports. Also, in the version without the axis the data labels are needed. I would read all the values correctly in the version with the faint grid lines and the axis even if the labels were removed. The labels interfere with the figure in many charts, although with Tim’s choice of colors I don’t think that is the case here.

True, my email to Tim stressed that numbers can be read more easily without being clutttered with dollar signs and percent signs. This applies to numbers in tables and axis labels as well as data labels. I didn’t mean to imply that we need the data labels here.

By: Tim Wilson

Tim Wilson — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:03:46 +0000

@Bryan Don’t worry — plenty of people are now referencing pie charts any time the opportunity presents itself when I’m around. Just tell me you don’t use any 3D effects in your pie charts and we can remain on speaking terms.

@Naomi — that’s a good point. In the example above, the x-axis is wholly redundant, isn’t it? I could take that off entirely and remove the vertical gridlines, too. Ahhh…the data-pixel ratio.

By: Naomi B. Robbins

Naomi B. Robbins — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:41:29 +0000

My latest rant is about too many percent signs in tables and graphs. They clutter the figure. Do you really need to tell us 13 times that the data in your bar graph is in percents? Why not just label the horizontal axis “Percent” and leave off all the percent signs?

By: Bryan Cristina

Bryan Cristina — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:56:41 +0000

You’re lucky I don’t work with you, I would probably go out of my way to use pie charts as much as possible

We still have a few pie charts, because to be honest, when you have a fairly visual report, it does a decent job of breaking things up a bit. With so many lines, bars, and bubbles, it’s nice to see something else stylistically that IMO is pretty simplistic.

Also, I think pie charts are EXCELLENT and showing -IN-significance. For instance (and this is purely an example), say someone in the mobile group thinks that mobile is so important everything else should be sacrificed. A nice pie chart, showing it’s 0.7% contribution to traffic, is a great way to say “Sorry, you’re insignificant.” Because while you have your 3% bar up there and of course it’s smaller than all the others, seeing all the data in one place and seeing the relative insignificance really proves a point. Usually I have 4-5 categories, and the colors are easy to distinguish. But I’m sure you don’t care

I have moved on to more useful reports though, such as a line graph because while you get the % from the bar chart quite easily, you also get clean trending, which is always useful.