3 Reasons to Avoid Using Pie Charts

Just don’t use pie charts. Here’s why:

1. You can’t make decisions based on a pie chart because they don’t show trends or changes from a previous period.
2. Good measurement shows relationships between two sets of data – i.e, headlines by month or messages by product line or sentiment by media outlet. Pie charts can’t do that, so they can’t help solve a problem or inform you about what is really happening.
3. They make it too easy to report bad or misleading data that shouldn’t be charted.  I’ve seen too many pie charts with headlines that say “20% of all coverage is negative” and when you dig into the data, you find that the 20% represents 1 story.

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