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From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

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"Dashboards by Example" is a business intelligence blog dedicated to showing you actual examples of do's and don'ts of dashboard design. Study examples of enterprise dashboards, scorecards and other business intelligence interfaces implemented by the world's top organizations.

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Don’t Eat the Dashboard Pie Chart

A dashboard means graphs. And, of course, graphs mean pie charts. Therefore dashboard means pie charts, doesn’t it? We all know and love the simple pie chart. Or do we? Is the pie chart really the best graph to place on our dashboards?

Dashboarding veteran Stephen Few issues some great warnings against using dashboard pie charts in his latest newsletter. The feature article entitled Save the Pies for Dessert explains why we dashboarders should not eat the pie.

Take a look at this excerpt. There is a great analysis of why line graphs are better than pie charts when comparing relative quantities:

why pie charts are not as good as line graphs

Stephen Few’s stance against the pie chart is well known. In his course on graph design, he shocks his students by railing against the use. They are quite during the class but come to him during the break to defend their frequent use of pie chart graphics.

In the article, Few does state that the pie graph does have its strengths - primarily that the “part to the whole” message very clearly comes through. Fractions are easily understood by all.

However, the difficulties of pie charting rapidly make themselves clear once you start portraying the data relationships typically found in enterprise dashboards. The advantages of line charts, bar graphs and other graph forms make the pie chart basically unusable.

Take a look at the article for the details. I think you’ll agree with me that this article on pie charting is destined to be the definitive guide to whether us dashboard designers should eat the pie chart or not.

The article also explains the history of the pie chart. I’ve exerpted some of the early pie chart graphs over at The Dashboard Spy site.

Tags: Dashboard Metrics, Dashboard Graphs, Dashboard Pie Chart, History of the Pie Chart, Pie Chart vs. Line Graph

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What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.

One Response to “Don’t Eat the Dashboard Pie Chart”

The Square Pie Chart Said on July 27th, 2008 at 9:13 pm quote
[...] Do you have pie chart graphs on your business dashboard? Everyone loves the pie chart. Business users love to casually use (and abuse) it as it’s the first graph that comes to mind. And as for you data visualization experts out there among the Dashboard Spy readers, admit it - you just love to hate the pie chart because of it’s constant misuse. (See Don’t Eat the Dashboard Pie Chart) [...]

Last Modified: Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 @ 17:15

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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"Dashboards By Example - BI Dashboard Samples" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

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