Abuse them as much as you like, they remain evolutionary winners.

Rather than curse them with megaphones from the rooftops, why don’t we dissect them and figure out why they survive and even thrive in human society?

Some here claim that pie charts tend to confuse and obscure the truth. A few pies do, and those should be stomped out or perhaps collected in glass jars for our amusement, as you do so well, Jon. (Especially those silly slanted 3-D ones, possibly with pies of pies.)

Many here point out that pie charts don’t allow very good resolution or accuracy. That is correct, of course: that is not their niche.

Effective pie charts are like sound bites. They provide a simple, memorable summary of the situation. Even if an audience is distracted and has other things they’d rather focus on, the pie chart delivers its big picture message in a matter of seconds or less. Even a child or busy executive can figure out whether one slice is a lot bigger, a lot smaller, or about the same size as another slice. That same child or busy executive intuitively grasps that the slices of a pie chart must add to 100% of a whole, or someone is cheating. Who knows at a glance whether a given bar chart will bother showing all the pieces, or have multiple selections that add to more than 100%?

Need to provide a quick and easily understood overview of a situation? The humble 2-D pie chart just might work fine. If you want to impress your audience with deep information content or visual effects, try something else.

I have stated on this blog that pie charts can be appropriate, but in a very small number of cases. In Political Pie Charts I cite the pies used by FiveThirtyEight to show poll and election results.

These pies work because there are only two or three data points in the chart, and the third, if present, has a value that’s out of whack with the other two (in this case, the third is very small). The effect is to compare two data points, and a pie makes it easy to see which one is greater than half, and roughly how much greater.

In my opinion, pies are great,

(1) when there are <4 slices (and labeled well)
(2) when one slice dominate the hell out of other (like may be Google vs. other searches, Windows vs. other OS')

But they get most criticism because they are the easiest kind of charts to abuse.

Hmm. I guess it depends on what you consider to be “best”. If your intention is to confuse, obfuscate, cloud* the issue, then we may be in the pie business. Of course, donuts and three-dimensionality should not be discarded lightly, neither should radars (a clarity-denying tool that is sadly-underutilised by unimaginative information-hiders).

So, is there ever a good use for a pie chart? (You’re allowed to say “no”)

* (addle, becloud, bedim, befuddle, bewilder, blind, blur, darken, daze, dim, eclipse, mist, muddy, mystify, perplex, puzzle are also suggested by a quick thesuarus check)

Also, I am sorry the color choice was kind of crappy. I should have retained the original colors instead of beautifying it.

@Jon.. Very well done sir, very well done.

My idea is to show the hidden grouping feature in pie charts. As I clearly state in my article’s last question, if I were to make such a chart, I would make a bar, not a pie. The article was to teach people who are making pie charts that there is such a feature to group smaller pies in to one big chunk and hopefully avoid another 100 sliced pie like this: http://chandoo.org/img/cb/top100-twitter-users-bad-pie-chart.jpg

But apart from the usual pie chart criticism, there is also the question of how the chart fits the data. The different meanings here are interesting in their relative frequencies, but it’s not terribly interesting how more of one usage would mean less of the other (there is no limit on how many total uses there can be). Also, I’m sure there are more uses of the word “bar” (bar mitzvah, for example) that the data doesn’t account for.

So my argument against the pie here would not even be about the wedges being too small, but that it’s simply the wrong representation. If I want to know which uses are the most common, and how much more common they are than others, the sorted bar or column chart is simply the way to go. That the numbers can be added up to the total observations you’ve made is just a side effect, and certainly not interesting enough to warrant a pie chart. Just because you can divide numbers by a total doesn’t mean that they add up to a meaningful whole.