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Maybe pie charts are not robust, but as I'm saying in the post, it's actually the best - if not the only - method to represent the contribution of the Top N contributors to a global measure. And only this. It's not meant to let the reader compare the relative measures of different items. If you wish to do so, I fully agree with your comment: use a bar chart instead.

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>it's actually the best - if not the only - method to represent the contribution of the Top N contributors to a global measure

Yet it's still not great at that. Stacked bar chart (basically an unrolled donut chart) is better - again, because people perceive linear distances with much higher precision than radial:

http://i1.wp.com/flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/...

I default to using treemaps for viewing composition of a whole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping

Treemaps are very powerful during the data crunching phase, but they are not ok for a final deliverable, as they ask way too much to the reader's brain to get understood.

Makes sense. I'm curious though, do you mean that even with the same number of categories for each it's too difficult? ie. instead of using hierarchical groupings and all categories no matter how small, use only the top ~10 and bucket the rest into "Other" similarly to a pie chart or bar.

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