Thursday, April 05, 2007

Yet another pie chart ...

Pie charts are as popular as entertaining. The latest highlight of chartjunk is here:
The pie chart was created by a java ccode profiling utility which is called checkstyle. I think I can leave it to the reader to find all the points, which go wrong here ... the use of transparency is clearly hard to top.

Thanks to Markus for pointing me to this nice pie.
Posted by Martin at 21:07:28 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) |
Comments
1 - Hi Martin - I think you mean pie chart! And no reference to pie charts can be complete without a pointer to the best pie chart ever: http://tinyurl.com/yvmrw3 (Comment this)

Written by: Hadley Wickham at 2007/04/05 - 23:12:05
2 - Hi Hadley,

brilliant consistency in mixing up the terms ;-) ... I should not edit posts when talking on the phone ...

But one question remains: Which one was first, pie chart or pacman? (Comment this)

Written by: Martin at 2007/04/06 - 23:15:19
3 - Good example of junk chart. Thanks for posting it. Since a big part of my work is communicating complex issues through charts and presentations, I grew into the bad habit of thinking how to improve on every chart I see. Here is my take on this one: http://jcandkimmita.info/jc/2007/04/business/some-more-junkchart/
 (Comment this)

Written by: Juan C. Mendez at 2007/04/09 - 06:17:16
4 - Juan,

The barchart is clearly the better choice, and plotting the bars horizontally is a good idea to make the labels more readable. The main problem with the chart is the far too big number of categories.
The "others" category is one solution to avoid clutter. In an interactive environment, one should have the possibility to drill down into this category.
An alternative would be to group categories hierarchical - if possible - to reduce the number of levels. (Comment this)

Written by: Martin at 2007/04/09 - 21:33:13 in reply to: 3
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