Tips for Designing Pie Charts

What’s a Pie Chart?

Pie Charts are popular ways for visualizing data in a simple and easy-to-understand way, that heps the audiences to quickly identify parts of a whole (numerical proportions of a section in proportion to the others). 

When to Use a Pie Chart

Pie Charts should be used for making part-to-whole comparisons (for example, the number of items sold each year compared to other company products). They create more impact when the comparisson of small data sets made among proportions rather than numbers. When needing to use addiotional data, grouped into smaller data sets you could use “other” categories on the chart.

Tips for Creating Bar Charts

1. Try to use 5 categories per pie chart at the most. When you use too many categories Pie Charts data visualization becomes harder. If needed, group smaller data sets into “other” categories, avoiding to hide key or significant information.
2. Using multiple Pie Charts for comparison is not good, as categories are hard to compare side-by-side. If you need to do that, stacked bar charts are the way to go.
3. Make sure the data used in the Pie Charts cateories adds to 100%.
4. Organize the Pie Charts categories correctly: You could place the largest section at 12 o’clock, going clockwise, the second largest section at 12 o’clock, going counterclockwise and the remaining sections can be placed below, continuing counterclockwise, or you could place the largest section at 12 o’clock, going clockwiseand theremaining sections in descending order, going clockwise.

A CHART IS WORTH A THOUSAND NUMBERS!

This is particularly true when to large amounts of data need to be presented easily and clearly. For that, these slides facilitate including data in PowerPoint tables that automatically and quickly update and outline complex tables into memorable charts.