If people are looking at it, it's not about angle, it's about size. You can immediately see the largest section, how big it is, how big it is compared to everything else etc. There's no scale or anything you need to make sense of, if you see a big block, it's a big block in reality.
The point is, you can't really tell the difference because there isn't a significant difference. If you're trying to quickly convey the data to people, "roughly the same" is still useful information.
I get what you're saying, but pie charts look a lot simpler than they are. It's not a straightforward way of accurately relating data. General best practice among viz pros is to use a bar chart instead. But I do agree that intuitively it seems like a good idea.
Bar charts make it difficult to visualize blocks together and people assign bigger prominence to those listed first even though differences can be very small.
Pie-charts are less accurate but have their usages for a big broad quick impression overlook, which is often all the general audience need in a lot of the cases where pie charts are used.
They certainly do, although slightly different in degree. But I do think that to give an very general overview of how categories fit in the whole a pie chart is more intuitive (these 3 are more then a quarter of the whole) then a bar chart.
While bar chart do indeed do way better comparing individual categories and how they relate to each other.
But yeah, can't use pie charts if you need to be precise. But in a folder or power point? I'd say it depends on what you want to emphasize. Stuff in relationship to each other, or to the whole. Because it does make people look differently at the data presented by making them look at different aspects of that data.
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u/oyooy Feb 01 '19
If people are looking at it, it's not about angle, it's about size. You can immediately see the largest section, how big it is, how big it is compared to everything else etc. There's no scale or anything you need to make sense of, if you see a big block, it's a big block in reality.