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So, while it’s clear the pie chart more effectively illustrates the breakdown for one specific month, the bar chart makes it much easier to see trends. It would not be possible to display this much information in a pie chart. The dotted trendline simplifies communications even further. It’s easy to visualize that the trend is moving in the right direction. If this company’s HR department has an initiative to get more staff working remotely, this chart shows great success. A bar chart can take the same data displayed in the pie chart and expand it to monthly over the course of a year - allowing a much more nuanced picture to emerge. Unlike pie charts, bar charts can display multiple dimensions that communicate a larger story. What was the breakdown a year or a month before? How does this fit in with the human resources (HR) department’s goals? But it is extraordinarily effective at answering the one question: What was the remote/on-site staff breakdown in July? What it doesn’t say could fill an HR manual. It clearly shows that more employees are working on-site. Look at the pie chart immediately below, which breaks down the staff of a company by whether they are on-site or remote. Pie charts are not effective at surfacing trends. Pie charts are best used to represent a simple, single layer of information where the differences between the numbers are the entire story.

Pie charts are more effective at communicating the differences between numbers, so it’s important that the relative size of the pie slices be distinguishable at a glance. Whether to use a pie chart or a bar chart depends largely on what question the chart is attempting to answer and how much information needs to be communicated. Can an underinformed person look at the pie chart and gain valuable information - or even insight? Pie Chart vs Bar Chart: And therein lies the pie chart’s biggest limit: It must be at-a-glance simple. How are employees distributed among a company’s departments? How many employees work remotely vs on-site? When our business loses sales, how are the “wins” distributed among our top five competitors? What percentage of all votes were cast for each candidate in an election?Ī pie chart’s greatest strength is how compactly and simply it can convey its idea. It’s ideal for communicating the composition of data.

It’s an attempt to convert a table of data into a memorable idea by using a circle - the “pie” - divided into sections, or slices. What Is a Pie Chart?Ī pie chart is a circular, graphical representation of data.

Knowing those limits will help you become a better communicator and presenter. The answer, of course, is that pie charts can, and do, play an important role in effective communication - in fact, one early use of pie charts helped expand human life expectancy by 50%. But is Professor Tufte right? Can the ubiquitous pie chart really be that bad? And is there anything a pie chart can do that a bar chart or line chart can’t do better? His 1983 book, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” has long been held as a gold-standard reference for excellent communication. “The only worse design than a pie chart is several of them,” says Edward Tufte, noted statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale University.

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