Comments on: Pie Chart Makeover?

Question: Pie Chart Makeover?

kjars — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:52:55 -0800

Pie Chart Help. How do I make my pie charts look like this one?

The previous intern apparently wowed the world with her charts, but all I have is the raw data in Excel and the final word document that has graphs looking like the one I linked to. Any ideas on what she used to make them look all pretty?

I'm not sure what other software we have around the office. I'm told Photoshop is somewhere...

By: CruiseSavvy

CruiseSavvy — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:17:15 -0800

Excel 2007.

(Meanwhile, Edward Tufte is continues to spin in his grave over charts that have meaningless detail, unnecessary like 3D shading. Er, desk chair.)

By: kjars

kjars — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:27:42 -0800

Thanks; Guess I have the one computer with Excel 2003.

By: electroboy

electroboy — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:29:26 -0800

Edward Tufte, like Abe Vigoda, is not dead.

By: madmethods

madmethods — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:37:28 -0800

To be specific about the Tufte comments, pie charts like that should not be used because they distort the data. Look at the "20%" slice in the back versus the "20%" slice in the front. If you really want to impress your coworkers, and they have any sense, you should fix the broken charts from the previous intern so that they're not misrepresenting the data anymore.

By: oblique red

oblique red — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:57:24 -0800

I had a similar situation once where a client wanted the spiffy looks of a 3-d graph but I did not want to misrepresent the data... the compromise situation we arrived at was to use a gradient fill on the bars. It wasn't ideal from an information-design point of view (the gradient didn't represent information, it was just decorative), but it did "fancy it up" without the more egregious data representation problems of the 3-d.

By: cortex

cortex — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:07:43 -0800

[A few comments removed. Please stick to helping with the actual question.]