Most of the times you pick up any report / numbers based article from the media, you will frequently see this animal called “Pie Chart” .

Actually if one thinks of it, Pie Chart is nothing but a polar transformation of a stacked bar chart.

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In that sense , a stacked bar chart gives much more visual information than pie chart. Its an empirical observation that most of us are not too comfortable with judging proportions based on the angles in a pie. Now if the angles subtended are huge, then we can discern the proportions, else it becomes difficult. Imagine a pie with 6 cuts and 4 of them are subtending 16, 14, 17 , 20 degrees. The pie chart then becomes completely useless.

Here is a summary of arguments, mostly against the use of pie chart.  Pie Chart arguments

Next time, you are about to use a pie chart, you might as well ditch it and go for a stacked bar chart.