An Exception: Before finance and econometrics, I did a lot of public health work. The kinds of charts shown by Jeff Clark — which remnd me of radial heat maps (pardon the pun) and others ARE intuitive and useful, but only in my view to time-constrained technical, scientific, or field practioners such as physicians. It would be poorly applied in a business setting. I found they were best done with call-outs to the underlying text. Done this way they convey a lot of information quickly, and better, help guide the user to accompanying text without forcing them to digest the entire text. That newsletter, later taken over by the CDC, received considerable praise from practizing clinicians with little time to wade through text.

Jorge & Tim – Thanks for the link, I want to make sure I give credit where credit is due.

http://people.howstuffworks.com/prison4.htm

Perhaps they need a feature on “How Math Works.” :-)

BTW, there’s a really nice column chart on the same page.

http://people.howstuffworks.com/prison4.htm.

Jon, many people say what they need is a graph type that makes the 100% nature of the summed segments clear. 100% stacked bars do that, but suffer from some of the same problems as donuts. Your Excel panel graphs, as demoed elsewhere, are the ideal compromise: they stack the whole, but they also align the bases of all the parts.

Or, you could be silly like me and stack them back to back :-)

Ha, and I even commented on it. I knew I’d gotten the link from somewhere.

As I said, I don’t think it does anything that a simple pivot chart cannot handle, and a pivot chart doesn’t distort the display by forcing it into a circle.

While we’re on the subject of pies not adding to 100%, how about this chart which compares recidivism rates based on the original crime:

I don’t recall where I found this gem. If anyone recognizes it, please let me know.