Gooddata Blog
Tips & Tricks: Stacked Bar Chart
Posted March 23, 2012 by Michelle Urban in
Best Practices
We talk a lot about Pie Charts here at GoodData. Are they useful? Are they a good representation of the data? Our Customer Success Managers, Ravi and Ayesha, both agree that when building reports and dashboards for customers, they tend to stay away from the use of Pie Charts. Instead, they often use Stacked Bar Charts.
Pie Chart: Shows either the absolute number or the percent breakdown. The relative size of pie slices can be hard to decipher, which cause distortions and error when reading the data.
Stacked Bar Chart: Shows the percentage, as well as the overall absolute total. Assessing relative bar length will reveal strong and weak performance.
Will the Pie Charts on your dashboards be replaced by Stacked Bar Charts?
4 Comments
I can’t entirely agree. That is not to say your post is incorrect - there are many cases similar to the one you are describing here. However, quite often the overall value is irrelevant, and especially where there are a few more categories within the total, and depending on context, the good old pie chart may be simply more suitable in terms of dashboard real estate use. On the other hand, yes, we quite often use Stacked Bar Charts with normalized metrics (so the total is always 1 and the values reflect just the ratios, which means one doesn’t need to show the axis or the axis gives a “running total” information). The choice always depends on the specific task and the meaning of data behind it. Pie Chart is not dead yet!
They are dead!
http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf
OK. So, if they’re dead, why do you still keep them in the UI as an option? You do make those decisions, right?
I would agree, most pie charts tend to be used in the wrong context. They have a place with when looking at overall percentages, but they are not actionable.
Stacked bar charts or multiple fever line charts giver users much more valuable information.
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