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The Square Pie Chart

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)

We’ve looked at the history of the pie chart, so now let’s ask: “What is the future of the pie chart?”. Of course, it will always continue as the defacto first choice among the information visualization newbies, but can it evolve into a variant worthy of advanced infovis use?

Well, there are advanced uses of the pie chart as demonstrated in the article by Jon Peltier, Pie of Pie Charts and other Pie Chart Tricks.

But how about a more dramatic evolution of the pie chart? How about a square pie chart? In his post, Pixels are the New Pies, Anil Dash (how’s that for a name for a Dashboard Spy?!), points out a couple of square variations of the pie chart.

Here is one from wired mag that shows a gadget spending trend chart.

Here’s what I mean by a square dashboard. Look at the upper left corner of this image:

Square Pie Chart style infovis graph used by Wired Magazine

And here is a thumbnail of another square pie chart as mentioned in the Anil Dash post:

Square Pie Charts - a new infographic trend

Updated: Here are some additional examples of square pie charts: Click on the “More” link if you are on the front page of “Dashboards By Example”.

These examples of pie charts allow reading within “accuracy of one percent” according to the post “Squaring the Pie” by Robert Kosara. Here is an excerpt:

Examples of square pie charts

And from Info Clarity’s “A Square Pie“:

Square Pie Charts showing demographic information

Animated square pie chart

What do you think? Is there a square pie chart on your next business dashboard?

Tags: Square Pie Chart, Dashboard graphs, Pie Chart History, Information visualization, Data Visualization

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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.  

6 Responses to “The Square Pie Chart”

  1. Jon Peltier Said on May 6th, 2008 at 4:46 pm quote

    These are really no better than pie charts, which are much less effective than people think. A simple bar chart shows the information with much greater clarity, without the user needing color vision, and without the user having to guess at areas of irregular shapes or count individual squares.

    The left hand version in the bottom rectangle (with green and yellow) was criticized by Juice Analytics (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2007/07/square-pie-eye/)

    Anil Dash didn’t come out and say they’re bad (http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/07/pixels-are-the-new-pies.html) but he did tag the post as “chart junk” and commenters on his post tore this chart type to shreds.

    Everybody should leave this chart out of their info viz toolbox.

  2. Jon Peltier Said on May 6th, 2008 at 4:47 pm quote

    And I forgot to mention, square pie charts were also roasted at the Bissantz blog (http://www.bella-consults.com/square-pies).

  3. Christiaan van Woudenberg Said on May 6th, 2008 at 4:59 pm quote

    What you refer to is a specific case of what we in the visualization community call a treemap (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemap).

    Christiaan

  4. mr tom Said on May 7th, 2008 at 3:14 am quote

    Those square ones are just plain confusing.

    There’s one advantage though - at least the users will know that they don’t understand what they’re looking at! ;)

  5. mr tom Said on May 7th, 2008 at 3:20 am quote

    Thinking about it. I think QlikView already has something like this.

  6. Ineffective Chart - Partition Chart Revisited (Defragged) » PTS Blog Said on July 10th, 2008 at 12:25 pm quote

    [...] the Pie?), and which was taken up by Juice Analytics (Squaring the Pie), Dashboards by Example (The Square Pie Chart), Anil Dash (Pixels Are The New Pies), Info Clarity (A square pie), Bella Consults (Square pies [...]

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Last Modified: Sunday, July 27th, 2008 @ 21:09

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 12:16 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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