Why are pie charts considered bad?

Because the value is encoded as an angle, and people compare angles far less accurately than lengths or positions. A pie with five similar slices cannot be ranked by eye, so readers end up reading the data labels, at which point the chart is doing no work.

What should I use instead of a pie chart?

A sorted horizontal bar chart, in most cases. It ranks the parts, shows the differences as lengths, fits long category names, and still lets you print the percentages as labels.

Is a donut chart better than a pie?

No, slightly worse. Removing the centre takes away the angle at the middle and leaves only arc length and area, both harder again. The hole is useful only as a place to print the total.

When is a pie chart acceptable?

Two cases: two or three parts where one is obviously dominant, and a familiar part-of-whole where the shape itself is the message, such as showing that a single item is roughly half. Beyond four slices, use bars.

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What to Use Instead of a Pie Chart, and the Two Times a Pie Is Fine

Michael Nocito · Updated August 2026 · Every number on this page was worked before it was published

The complaint about pie charts is not fashion. A pie encodes each value as an angle, and comparing angles is one of the least accurate things human vision does, well behind comparing lengths along a common baseline. That is why a five-slice pie ends up covered in data labels: the labels are doing the job the chart failed to do.

What you do: default to a sorted horizontal bar chart. Keep the pie for two or three parts where one obviously dominates.

The short version. If the reader has to read the labels to rank the slices, the chart is decoration around a table.

The five-slice problem

Channel	Share	Angle
Direct	24%	86 degrees
Search	22%	79 degrees
Referral	20%	72 degrees
Email	18%	65 degrees
Social	16%	58 degrees

Direct is half again as big as Social, 24 against 16. Drawn as slices, the difference is 86 degrees against 58, and slices at different rotations around a circle. Ask a room to rank those five from memory after two seconds and you will get five different orders.

The same five as sorted horizontal bars: five lengths from a common left edge, ranked top to bottom, labels sitting flat and readable. Ranking is now free, and the 8 point spread between top and bottom is visible as a length rather than inferred from an arc.

The five replacements, ranked

Instead of a pie	Use when	Why it is better
Sorted horizontal bar	Almost always	Common baseline, ranked, long labels fit
100 percent stacked bar	Comparing mixes across groups	Several pies become one chart
Dot plot	Many categories, small differences	Position beats length for fine reads
Treemap	Nested parts, very unequal sizes	Shows hierarchy a pie cannot
A well-formatted table	Under six numbers people will quote	Nobody misreads a number

That last row is not a joke. If the audience is going to quote the figures in an email, a table with a bold total and right-aligned percentages outperforms every chart on this page.

Multiple pies is the worst version. Four pies side by side asking a reader to compare Q1 to Q4 is four sets of angles at four rotations. Replace with one 100 percent stacked bar chart, four bars, segments in a fixed order, and the comparison becomes a single vertical scan.

The two times a pie is fine

Two or three parts, one dominant. "Two thirds of revenue comes from one product" is a shape people read instantly and correctly. Halves, thirds and quarters are the angles humans genuinely can judge, because we have been reading clock faces since childhood.

The shape is the message. If the point is that something is about half, the round picture communicates half faster than a bar does. That is a narrow case, and it is the case that keeps pies in newspapers.

Outside those: four slices is the edge, five is too many, and any pie with an other slice bigger than its smallest real slice has already lost the argument.

If you must ship a pie

Start the largest slice at twelve o'clock and go clockwise in descending order. The eye reads from the top.
Put the labels on the slices, not in a legend. Legend hunting is what makes pies exhausting.
Show the percentage and the raw value together. A pie hides magnitude completely.
Never explode a slice, never tilt it into 3D. A tilted pie makes near slices look bigger, which is a distortion with no upside.
Cap it at four slices with a labelled other, and say in the subtitle what other contains.

Doing it in Excel

Sort the data descending in the sheet first. Excel plots pies and bars in sheet order.
For a horizontal bar, Insert, Bar, Clustered Bar. Note that Excel plots bar charts bottom to top, so sort ascending in the sheet if you want the largest at the top.
Add data labels, then Number Format the labels as percentages with no decimals unless the differences need them.
Delete the gridlines and the axis for a labelled bar chart. Once every bar carries its number, the axis is redundant ink.
Set gap width to about 50 percent so the bars are thicker than the gaps.

How to apply this to your own work

Find every pie in your reporting and count the slices. Anything above four gets converted this week.
Find any slide with more than one pie and replace the whole set with a single 100 percent stacked bar.
Take one pie, cover the labels, and try to rank the slices. Whatever you cannot do, your reader cannot do either.
Check the other slice. If it is larger than a named slice, the categories need regrouping, not a different chart.
For any pie under six numbers, try a table version and see which one your colleagues prefer to quote from.

The one habit to keep

Ask what comparison you are asking the reader to make, then ask whether they could make it with the labels removed. A chart that only works with its labels on is a table wearing a costume.

How many slices are on the pie in your last deck?

Every number here was worked before it was published. The angles are the shares times 360: 24 percent is 86.4 degrees, 16 percent is 57.6 degrees.

People do not read a pie chart. They read the labels on a pie chart.

Charts and Visualization is the chart-choosing book: what each shape can carry, what it quietly distorts, and how to label it so the reader reaches your finding without being told.

Charts and Visualization, $19 →

One question picks the chart.

Choosing the right chart is the decision table, and stacked against grouped bars covers the composition cases in more depth. The Excel Kit has the build steps.

Read Choose the Right Chart →