Pie charts forbidden in consulting
Consulting channels on YouTube like Firm Learning and The Analyst Academy mentioned that pie charts are never used in consulting. Is this true and why would this be the case?I have data on the different location types (e.g., residency, school, office buildings) that a food delivery platform delivers to. I want to show their respective proportions out of all deliveries. I only have one time period of data to present. There's no better way I could think of to display the information other than a pie/donut chart. Are there other ways that are more illustrative?
Edit: additional information after comment about stacked bar chart showing changes of proportion overtime
Not a consultant, but I never use them because they are very hard to read (can’t tell that easily what exact percentage a slice is unless you read any text labels that may or may not there), and they don’t show historical evolution of changes (only plots one time period at a time).
A simple stacked bar chart where each stack is a segment is better to me.
Hey there thanks for responding. I agree with you that the pie chart is static and doesn't show the changes in percentages throughout different time periods. I only have one period of data to show, so the stacked bar chart would only be a single stacked bar. It would be ideal to have data for multiple time periods. In my case I don't see another way to present the data…
Redundant, deleted
Imo pie charts are just hard to format. They aren't space-efficient and it's hard to make the labels look organized.
Stacked bar charts do the same thing. I make slides all the time with just one stacked bar. You can add notes/observations next to each segment (separated by horizontal lines), put the total amount on top of the bar, and voila--clean, appealing, effective slide.
Pie charts are absolutely fine and we use them all the time. You just need to know what type of data to show on them. Anyone who tells you to never use a specific type of graph doesn't have a clue how to properly use it.
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