Please don't use pie charts

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

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.

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.

See Tufte's forum for a discussion:

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

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

"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...

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.

If there are only 2 wedges it works pretty well.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.