Indeed, Nightingale reconfigured the pie chart making the length of the wedges variable instead of their width.

įlorence Nightingale may not have invented the pie chart, but she adapted it to make it more readable, which fostered its wide use, still today. Playfair thought that pie charts were in need of a third dimension to add additional information. This invention was not widely used at first. One of those charts depicted the proportions of the Turkish Empire located in Asia, Europe and Africa before 1789. Playfair presented an illustration, which contained a series of pie charts. The earliest known pie chart is generally credited to William Playfair's Statistical Breviary of 1801, in which two such graphs are used. Pie charts can be replaced in most cases by other plots such as the bar chart, box plot, dot plot, etc. However, they have been criticized, and many experts recommend avoiding them, as research has shown it is difficult to compare different sections of a given pie chart, or to compare data across different pie charts.

Pie charts are very widely used in the business world and the mass media.

The earliest known pie chart is generally credited to William Playfair's Statistical Breviary of 1801. While it is named for its resemblance to a pie which has been sliced, there are variations on the way it can be presented. In a pie chart, the arc length of each slice (and consequently its central angle and area) is proportional to the quantity it represents. Pie chart of populations of English native speakersĪ pie chart (or a circle chart) is a circular statistical graphic, which is divided into slices to illustrate numerical proportion.

How to create pie chart in excel 2010