DSA Insights

Instead of calling them pie charts, we’ll just call them donut (doughnut) charts and make them magically delicious.  Wrong.  These two charts, which appeared in the July 14th issue of BusinessWeek, are some of the worst charts I’ve seen in a while.  Note: in the print version, the legend doesn’t cover up the actual chart.  I’m not sure why this wasn’t fixed in the online graphic. 

There have been many articles and blog posts written on the ineffectiveness of pie charts, so I won’t belabor the point more.  For more information about why pie charts (donut charts with the center filled in) are not a good data visualization option, see the links below.  There’s no point in saying the same thing in a different way.  The timing of this post is good being that Seth Godin recently created a lot of stir about bar charts, which led to more pie chart discussions.

Related books:

Creating More Effective Graphs by Naomi B. Robbins

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten by Stephen Few

Related links on discussion of Bar and Pie charts:

DSA Insights

Jon Peltier

Peltier Technical Services

Jorge Camoes - Charts

Juice Analytics Original

Juice Analytics

Stephen Few

Edward Tufte

Junk Charts

Note: the first pie chart is credited to William Playfair roughly 200 years ago.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Analytics, BI, Chartjunk, Presentation, Reporting, Tony, Visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.