Last week we were asked to pick a data book from the office's library and write a blog about something interesting we learned during training. I chose the book Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (and I really recommend this book to everyone who’s starting in the data analytics field and wants to understand more about data visualization).
For this blog, I decided to focus on pie charts. In Chapter 2, the author mentions: 'Pie charts are evil.'
So why does she say that? Here are a few reasons:
- They make it difficult to compare data accurately because our eyes aren’t good at judging angles.
- They can hide important differences between categories if the slices are similar in size.
- They are not good when you have too many categories.
Here are some alternatives to pie charts that the author mentions:
- Bar Charts
- Treemaps
- Stacked Bar Charts
- Donut Charts (the author isn't really a fan of these either, but I personally think they are nice to use sometimes😁)
If you're still new to this and don’t know how to create these charts yet, I’ve added links you can click on. They’re from other Data School Consultants’ blogs, and they’ll walk you through step by step in an very easy way to follow.