Speaking of pie charts, if the title on the pie chart in the top left of the dashboard above is correct (”Average Salary by Work Department”), that is a completely inappropriate use of a pie chart. The averages in no way can add up to a whole of 100%, and that’s the only justification (and a weak one) for using a pie chart. Instead a bar or column chart would provide a much better visual for comparison of the average salaries of the different departments.

The 3D exploded pie chart in the second row of the dashboard is practically illegible. A 2D pie would be better, but a bar or column would be better still.

This blog has a lot of information and I take it a lot of faithful readers. It would be much stronger if it were more critical about the many example dashboards you exhibit. You could drive improvement of submitted examples and of the dashboards created by your readers.

I stopped reading the Dashboard Spy, because it presented the good and the bad, and made no judgement about which was which, or how to turn the bad into good.