Pie Chart

You can use a pie chart to show the part-to-whole relationships or composition of an element.

Pie charts are notoriously difficult to read, especially if your data has too many values or if the differences between values are too small. It works best when highlighting one value for comparison against the rest.

Usage guidelines

When to use

Questions you can answer

• What is the composition of this data?
• What are the proportions relative to the total?

WHen not to use

• A histogram is also appropriate to visualize the composition of a category.
• If you want to compare the composition of multiple categories, use a stacked bar chart instead.

Usage recommendations

Arrange values from largest to smaller, starting at 12 o'clock.

Don't show more than 5 values as it will be difficult to read.

It's preferable to use relative data, as percentages. In this case, the total can't go over 100%

Don't use two or more pie charts to compare changes or differences.

As it's very difficult to perceive small differences between slices, include annotations with values.

Related components