This year has been busiest year since inception of Chandoo.org. Wow, that is 10 years in a row of breaking previous records.
We had 101 posts, 7,400+ comments this year. Since our forum went thru a migration, I could not gather exact stats for forum. We have trained more than 2,500 people thru my online classes – Excel School, VBA Classes & Power Pivot classes.
More than 7.5 million people visited our site in last 1 year (up 14%) and consumed a whopping 20 million pages (up 16%). Each of these visitors spent an average of 2 minutes 21 seconds on our site becoming awesome in Excel. There are 1.8 million people who spent at least 15 minutes on our site.
We have added more than 25,000 members to our newsletter / RSS reader community, crossing 80,000 mark. It is a busy year.
Top 10 posts written in 2013
Top 10 formulas for analysts [Visitors: 65,638]
Employee vacation tracker [Visitors: 42,659]
Interactive chart in Excel – How to make it? [Visitors: 42,416]
Angry Formulas game… [Visitors: 36,392]
Learn top 10 Excel features [Visitors: 25,723]
To-do list with priorities – Excel templates [Visitors: 19,947]
Introduction to Power Pivot [Visitors: 21,298]
Best new features in Excel 2013 [Visitors: 21,539]
How to create interactive calendar in Excel? [Visitors: 17,478]
5 Keyboard shortcuts for writing better formulas [Visitors: 18,577]
Honorable mentions
How to create a then vs. now interactive chart? [Visitors: 16,711]
Shaded line charts in Excel [Visitors: 17,397]
INDEX formula usage, tips and tricks [Visitors: 16,280]
Rules for making awesome column charts [Visitors: 11,863]
Top 10 pages in Chandoo.org – 2013
As you can guess, a lot of people visit articles and pages that are not necessarily published in 2013. Here is a lit of most visited pages in our site in 2013.
Chandoo.org home page [Visitors: 559,208]
Excel Dashboards – Information, examples & tutorials [Visitors: 386,066]
Excel Pivot Tables Tutorial [Visitors: 487,794]
Project Management using Excel – Information, examples & tutorials [Visitors: 243,186]
Free Excel Templates for download [Visitors: 266,153]
Advanced Excel Skills [Visitors: 179,702]
VBA & Excel Macro Examples [Visitors: 132,938]
Excel Formulas home page [Visitors: 109,743]
Delete Blank Rows in Excel [Visitors: 198,543]
Excel Formulas Are Not Working [Visitors: 200,254]
Honorable mentions
Excel School online training program [Visitors: 163,952]
Between Formula Excel [Visitors: 181,539]
Chandoo.org forum [Visitors: 83,264]
Excel Sumproduct Formula [Visitors: 158,830]
Key trends this year
This year our main themes were,
- Making more people awesome in Excel, Dashboards, Power Pivot & VBA
- Teaching new ways of writing formulas to thru Formula Forensics & Formula Challenges series
- Meeting more of our readers face to face thru live classes in USA & Malaysia.
- Engaging our Facebook fans thru exclusive content
- Having lots of fun, playfulness and curiosity all the while.
Which posts did you enjoy most this year?
I hope you had a busy and fruitful year. Go ahead and tell us which posts, tips & articles you enjoyed most in 2013 using comments. And oh yea, wishing you a happy new year!
14 Responses to “Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability”
I think the virtue of pie charts is precisely that they are difficult to decode. In many contexts, you have to release information but you don't want the relationship between values to jump at your reader. That's when pie charts are most useful.
[...] link Leave a Reply [...]
Chandoo,
millions of ants cannot be mistaken.....There should be a reason why everybody continues using Pie charts, despite what gurus like you or Jon and others say.
one reason could be because we are just used to, so that's what we need to change, the "comfort zone"...
i absolutely agree, since I've been "converted", I just find out that bar charts are clearer, and nicer to the view...
Regards,
Martin
[...] says we can Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability. Such a pie has too many labels to fit into a tight space, so you need ro move the labels around [...]
Chandoo -
You ask "Can I use an alternative to pie chart?"
I answer in You Say “Pie”, I Say “Bar”.
This visualization was created because it was easy to print before computers. In this day and age, it should not exist.
I think the 100% Bar Chart is just as useless/unreadable as Pies - we should rename them something like Mama's Strudel Charts - how big a slice would you like, Dear?
My money's with Jon on this topic.
The primary function of any pie chart with more than 2 or 3 data points is to obfuscate. But maybe that is the main purpose, as @Jerome suggests...
@Jerome.. Good point. Also sometimes, there is just no relationship at all.
@Martin... Organized religion is finding it tough to get converts even after 2000+ years of struggle. Jon, Stephen, countless others (and me) are a small army, it would take atleast 5000 more years before pie charts vanish... patience and good to have you here 🙂
@Jon .. very well done sir, very well done.
good points every one...
I've got to throw my vote into Jon's camp (which is also Stephen Few's camp) -- bars just tend to work better. One observation about when we say "what people are used to." There are two distinct groups here (depending on the situation, a person can fall in either one): the person who *creates* the chart and the person who *consumes* the chart. Granted, the consumers are "used to" pie charts. But, it's not like a bar chart is something they would struggle to understand or that would require explanation (like sparklines and bullet graphs). Chart consumers are "used to" consuming whatever is put in front of them. Chart creators, on the other hand, may be "used to" creating pie charts, but that isn't an excuse for them to continue to do so -- many people are used to driving without a seatbelt, leaving lights on in their house needlessly, and forwarding not-all-that-funny anecdotes via email. That doesn't mean the practice shouldn't be discouraged!
[...] example that Chandoo used recently is counting uses of words. Clearly, there are other meanings of “bar” (take bar mitzvah or bar none, for [...]
[…] Grouping smaller slices in pie chart […]
Good article. Is it possible to do that with line charts?
Hi,
Is this available in excel 2013?