![]() I agree to the Privacy Statement and to the handling of my personal information. By submitting this form, you confirm that you agree to the storing and processing of your personal data by Salesforce as described in the Privacy Statement. ![]() By submitting this form, you acknowledge and agree that your personal data may be transferred to, stored, and processed on servers located outside of the People's Republic of China and that your personal data will be processed by Salesforce in accordance with the Privacy Statement. Here’s an example of a donut that is effective at using the ring’s shading to display salaries in proportion to each other: Visualization by Ryan Sleeper with data from SeanLahmanīy registering, you confirm that you agree to the processing of your personal data by Salesforce as described in the Privacy Statement. The cons are that it’s hard to interpret things like variance and rank, and humans generally aren’t as good at registering the differences in the ring’s filled-in angle area as with other easy-comparison formats like bar charts. It can also be used as a gauge to call out a single percentage. Please send me that data set.) The pros of a donut chart are that it’s effective at showing parts within a whole, but unlike a pie chart, it frees up white space at the core to throw in a total, call out a number, or add another data marker. ![]() (On a side note, do you ever wonder if there is a correlation between people who like donut charts and stuffed-crust pizza? I do. In the example below, even though it’s the same shape as a pie chart, the donut conveys information a bit differently: Because people are so overexposed to pie charts early and often throughout their lifetimes, there’s a key advantage in translating the info to a donut-it speeds up the time it takes the viewer to decode the parts and the whole of the visualization. And maybe you just like the shape of circles because they symbolize many good things, like the sun or wheels-or donuts. It may be important for a viewer to quickly know that something adds up to 100 percent. The first two suggestions are certainly different approaches to variance and ranking, but sometimes you need a simple way to convey the parts with the whole. Here’s a great dumbbell chart example that reflects the increase of women in the House of Representatives as it relates to party: Visualization by Katie Kilroy, with data from Congressional Research Service By contrast, the pies all look like peace signs and it is really hard to know both the rank across the categories and how they have changed year over year. From a visual perspective with the dumbbell/tri-bell presentation, it is easy to see that in 2018, furniture had a lower sales distribution than office supplies and technology. Technically this chart is a tri-bell rather than a dumbbell, but the point is that it gives the information some dimension. The dumbbell chart, also known as the DNA chart, is a great way to show change by using visual lengths. If the primary message you want to send to your viewer is variance, it’s helpful to know that humans are really good at detecting and valuing the distance between objects. One of the most common abuses of pie charts is to use many of them together to display change over time or across categories. Before you cook up another pie chart, consider these alternatives: But I have challenged myself to show you five unusual alternatives to boring data visualization. Most of the existing content on this subject will direct you to use a bar chart or line chart instead. Perhaps it’s more about making sure the painter has more colors to pick from. However, just like you wouldn’t remove colors from the painter’s palette and say, “No more green for you!” I don’t think the solution is to delete Excel and pie charts off everyone’s computer. They have even earned the nickname “walls of data.” The connection here is that pie charts and Excel spreadsheets are both overused and stretched to do things they were not meant to do. I have sensed similar feelings toward Excel spreadsheets. I just think they should be used less often. Unlike Tukey and design theorist Edward Tufte-who said, “The only worse design than a pie chart is several of them”-I am not of the opinion that pie charts should never be used. ![]() Mathematician John Tukey felt that there was no data displayed in a pie chart that couldn’t be better displayed in another type of chart. Some people feel they should never be used. Working in data visualization, you hear all sorts of opinions on pie charts. Every time I see a 3D pie chart made in Excel, I die a little on the inside. This article was originally published on Medium.
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