Peltier Technical Services - Excel Charts and Programming
It’s a week early for Pi Day (next Saturday, 3/14), but Dilbert has provided us with a nice pie chart.
It does illustrate the unnatural popularity of the genre, don’t you think?
Original at Dilbert comic strip for 03/07/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.
Thanks to Dermot, who emailed this to me moments before I saw it in my feed reader.
Like me, you probably spent years scribbling all manner of pointless line graphs and bar art at school, but you’ll now find it tough to rule two lines, plot some points, and stick a best-fit curve through the whole merry lot without making it look like a car crash in flatland.
So says Nick Cernis in Stick a Chart in It.
Among the charts he’s created for anyone in a hurry who just needs to pad a report is this Pork Pie Chart:
In Paper-Based Pie Chart Graphs, the information aesthetics blog shows a pie chart that isn’t printed on paper, but is actually fabricated out of paper. It came from Paper Graphs, on Nicholas O’Leary‘s knolleary blog. This seems to be more a work of art than a chart, so maybe it’s okay.
But I get the idea that information aesthetics is taking this rather seriously as a useful way to display data. A 2D chart is ineffective enough for conveying informtion, and a pseudo 3D chart on a flat display (or a printed page) exaggerates the ineffectiveness. This sculpture can only be worse.
So information aesthetics is hosting a contest to find the best information display based on, but not printed on, paper. They chose this picture the headline the post announcing the contest.
My thoughts exactly. Or maybe…
Federico gives us this excellent example of a 3D pie chart, thanks to GraphJam.
The only way I can think of to improve this chart is to explode the segments.
Oh yeah, and animate it. I’ve done just that in this zipped workbook.
GraphJam ought to be banned. After I came across the pie chart at the top of the page (I forget where I first saw it, but thanks somebody!), my daughter and I wasted spent an hour laughing at other graphs.
Before you think I’m completely against pie charts altogether, let me say that there are some pie charts, even in 3D and exploded varieties, which are acceptable and even welcome. This one came to me thanks to Nathan of Flowing Data. It is actually a commercial product by Mary and Matt.
I feel a Homer moment coming on.
I know I’ve railed against dial gauges in the past, and I’ve removed instructions for creating a speedometer type chart from my site. But this particular implementation is completely appropriate.
From The New Yorker Magazine.