Stop Using Pie-Charts

Pie charts let you tell percentages at a glance, which is a good thing to be able to tell. If your data is not dividing up a pie, a pie chart might not be the best fit, and if you need to tease out questions like "which is the biggest" given several close numbers, it definitely isn't a good fit. It especially helps when you order the slices in a hostile way - if it was otherwise confusing, just order them clockwise by size instead of going with the (irrelevant in this format) data order.

Any chart format has a set of data for which it's a terrible fit. Different formats have different information optimized to communicate at a glance, and if you're deliberately using the wrong one, you'll end up with a bad graph; that's not a takedown of the format itself.

I have to disagree, animation is again a storytelling tool. Instead of a flat presentation of data now you actually have a story with a beginning middle and end, it's much more engaging than a flat line chart.

Take the animated bar charts that where sort of a trend for a while on Twitter and Reddit, they got popular for a reason; they are interesting to look at. These types of charts, if done well, make you curious what will happen and how it will end.

With data visualization, and actually all design, you always have to consider your goals and audience.

Don't know why you're downvoted; pie charts are exclusively used for obfuscating data for clients in a pretty way.

No sane person who cares about data-driven decisions uses piecharts.

This article is weird. It centres on the central premise that pie charts are useless because you can't tell exactly the relative sizes of slices that are very similarly sized. That's not the point of a pie chart, which is to show clearly which areas are big and which are insignificant.

The article then poses the question "Let’s See if it actually rains more on the weekend." Looking at the pie chart, it's immediately obvious at a glance, that YES, it does rain more at the weekend, as the two segments for Saturday and Sunday together account for nearly half the pie. Clearly the pie chart is perfect for answering this question. But then, the article launches into a whole spiel about how pie charts are useless because you can't tell which was rainier between Saturday or Sunday.

However, if you used an alternative presentation e.g. the lollipop charts as they suggest, then it's NOT obvious for answering the question of whether the 2 weekend days rained more or less than the 5 other days. Rather it's benefit is in determining which days were the rainiest.

The obvious take-home is to use the appropriate graph to illustrate the conclusion you're trying to make from the data, but also include the raw data so that others can analyse it if they think there might be other details that are important.

I think the "Let’s See if it actually rains more on the weekend." is not really want the author actually wants to test. The text in the image above says "What do you call the day after two days of rain? Monday". This suggests that Saturday and Sunday are the rainiest and second rainiest days of the week.

So what the author wants to see is if both Saturday and Sunday are rainier than any other week. So the problem isn't that you can't differentiate between those two days, but that you can't between either of those days individually and Monday.