- Joined
- Dec 26, 2000
- Posts
- 13,852
I like pie charts. What do you suggest I use instead?
I work with statisticians and economists all day long. If you ever walk into a meeting with a pie chart you'll hear groans. It's just a rank-armature chart I was shocked when I first entered into analytics how strongly some people felt about data being displayed in pie charts. When you listen to their reasoning, though, and the first article I sent you summed it up the best, I can't really disagree with them.
The most elegant charts don't require data labeling.
You shouldn't need to have any extraneous numbers on your data in order to make your point.
If you do, you are using the wrong chart.
Industry standard for conveying data quickly is the bar chart. Your line graph is probably the second favorite (and you can immediately see how readable that is, even without the Y axis labeled... We can immediately see the most productive years for games).
Like I said, just friendly advice I'm not going to berate you on your use of a pie chart, but there are several people in the analytics community that would. Just FYI. By the way, what software did you use to generate these?