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Accepted Solutions
Hi Stacy,
You may want to consider a horizontal bar chart instead of a pie chart.
For me pie charts quickly get difficult to make sense of when the number of pie slices gets over three or four. Your eye flits back and forth between the pie and the legend and when you compare different slices you need to remember who's who's. If you have to use more than a very few basic colours it gets very hard. In your chart I think you spent twice as much time reading as you do driving but I'm not sure. And remember there are a significant number of people who have real difficulty with perception of colour. In the bar chart you don't need to fuss about colour because the labels you need are immediately adjacent to the bars.
Also comparing differences in angle or area in a pie chart is just harder to do than comparing bar lengths.
Pie charts do have one thing in their favour - it is obvious that in a pie chart all the parts add up to a whole and this is not obvious with bar charts unless explained.
Hi Stacy,
You may want to consider a horizontal bar chart instead of a pie chart.
For me pie charts quickly get difficult to make sense of when the number of pie slices gets over three or four. Your eye flits back and forth between the pie and the legend and when you compare different slices you need to remember who's who's. If you have to use more than a very few basic colours it gets very hard. In your chart I think you spent twice as much time reading as you do driving but I'm not sure. And remember there are a significant number of people who have real difficulty with perception of colour. In the bar chart you don't need to fuss about colour because the labels you need are immediately adjacent to the bars.
Also comparing differences in angle or area in a pie chart is just harder to do than comparing bar lengths.
Pie charts do have one thing in their favour - it is obvious that in a pie chart all the parts add up to a whole and this is not obvious with bar charts unless explained.