In the 4th session of Chandoo.org podcast, lets talk about Pie charts.
Pie charts evoke strong opinions among analysts & managers. Some people love them and can’t have enough of them in reports. Others despise them and go to any lengths to avoid them. And that is why we are going to talk about them in this session.
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What is in this session?
This sessions is all about pies, donuts, bars & bubbles. Yummy, I say!
You will learn,
- Special, secret transmission from guest stars
- What is a pie chart?
- Why they work? 2 reasons
- Why they don’t work ? 4 reasons
- Cousins & siblings of Pie charts
- Donut charts
- Gauge charts (speedometer)
- 3D pies
- Area charts
- Bubble charts
- 4 Situations when making a pie chart is ok
- Alternatives to Pie charts
- Mistakes you should avoid
- About the resources
- Conclusions
Go ahead and listen to the show
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Links & Resources mentioned in this session:
Books mentioned
Articles & Discussion on Pie Charts
Good examples of Pie charts
Bad examples of Pie charts
Debatable examples of Pie charts
- World polls chart – pie + donut – interesting but questionable
- Pie of a pie of a pie chart – interesting but avoidable
Alternatives & Improvements to Pie charts
Extra resource:
Note about book links: The links to various books mentioned in this podcast are affiliate links. It means when you click on them & purchase, good folks at Amazon pay me a few cents. I recommend these books because I genuinely love them. I would have recommended even if there is no benefit to me.
Transcript of this session:
Click here to download the transcript.
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Do you use Pie charts?
I do not avoid them completely. Once in a while I like to throw a pie in to my dashboards. They are a great way to visualize data despite the pitfalls.
What about you? Do you use pie charts? Please share your experience using comments.
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good