Pies are for eating

There are better ways to show your data.

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Pies are delicious but often inscrutable when applied to data. Humans are pretty good at deciphering some visual cues and pretty bad at others. For example, we do well when comparing lengths along a common scale. So looking at this image, we can confidently proclaim the E bar as the tallest. But we would be hard pressed to pick out which pie slice is largest. That’s because we don’t do so well with angles. So when comparing the quantities of several things, bar charts are almost always better than pie charts. The only exception is when you want to compare a part to a whole. In this case, a pie chart does a good job of showing that girls, for example, represent only a sliver of all the participants in a program or that 30 to 40 year olds are the majority of visitors to an event. But once you get beyond 2 (or maybe 3) slices, skip the pie and dust off the trusty bar chart.