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Does anyone know why there isn't a Pie Chart in the Acumatica Dashboards? I can see Doughnut, Line, Column, Stacked Column, Bar, Stacked Bar, and Funnel charts available, but no Pie charts?
Hi Kermit,
You are correct. No Pie Charts. Just Doughnut Charts which are basically Pie Charts with a hole in the middle of them.
I have no idea why there aren't any Pie Charts. Maybe it's because the Acumatica developers are in Moscow, Russia and they prefer doughnuts over "American pie"?
However, have you considered that Pie Charts are often a confusing way to convey information? The reason is that it's difficult / impossible for the brain to compare different slices of the pie to see which one is bigger. And, even if you can figure out which one is bigger, how MUCH bigger is another confusing question altogether.
I'm not a data visualization guru by any means. I'm more of a "numbers" person. But the data visualization community is pretty unanimous about their hatred of Pie Charts.
Here is one article from a well-known data visualization guru discouraging the use of Pie Charts: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf
What you might consider using instead is a Bar Chart. A Bar Chart makes it a lot easier to compare the sizes of the slices and also sorts the sizes in an obvious order from biggest to smallest.
Consider the following examples of displaying the same data in two different ways: as a Pie Chart and as a Bar Chart
See how it's easier to compare the sizes of the slices with the second chart, the Bar Chart?
Acumatica Version 6.10.0472 used when composing this response
Hmmm. Very interesting. I guess I never thought about it that way. That's totally true, Pie Charts are confusing.
It just seems like you see them in every dashboard so I thought that I needed one to have a proper dashboard.
But maybe I don't.
I agree. I think that's the main problem: Dashboard software companies keep using Pie Charts in their demos. So people think that they are needed. I just don't think that they are, at least most of the time.
But it would be good if Acumatica could include Pie Charts in their dashboards just for the sake of doing what every other dashboard software product does, just so people don't have to ask why they are missing.
Ya, I guess it would be good to have them. But I'm going to go with Bar Charts for now whenever I'm tempted to use a Pie Chart and see how it goes.
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