Crafting Compelling Stories with Doughnut Charts
Doughnut charts provide a clear and visually engaging method to showcase the distribution of resources and expenditures across various departments in an organization. It’s useful for illustrating proportions, percentages, and categorical breakdowns.
What is a doughnut chart?
A doughnut chart is used to represent the distribution of data categories and their relative proportions in the form of doughnut slices. Its form makes it easier to distinguish individual segments while providing an overall view of the data’s composition in totaling 100%.
When to use a doughnut chart
A doughnut chart can be used:
- To present the proportionality of each item to the total.
- To represent various data sets.
- When comparing fewer than seven groups.
- When you have a single data series.
- When you don’t want to plot a zero (0) value.
When not to use a doughnut chart
Don’t use a doughnut chart:
- When you have too many data categories.
- When you need to show negative values.
- When you need to compare changes over time.
- When the chart has too many arcs or slices.
- When dealing with 3D charts, since they are more complex to analyze.
Advantages of using a doughnut chart
- Easy to understand: They are simple and easy to interpret, making them suitable for presenting data to a wide range of users, including nontechnical stakeholders.
- Visual comparison: They allow for a quick comparison among various segments within a data set.
- Focus on proportions: They emphasize the relative proportions of categories within a whole, making it easy to grasp the distribution of data.
- Good for percentages: Doughnut charts are used for displaying percentages, as the whole doughnut displays 100%, and each segment represents a portion of that total.
- Appealing design: The circular shape and color options in a doughnut chart can make the data visually appealing and engaging.
How to configure doughnut charts with Bold BI
To configure doughnut charts in Bold BI, use the intuitive interface to tailor data sources, labels, colors, and tooltips. You can create dynamic and visually attractive doughnut chart visualizations effortlessly. Use this documentation to learn how to configure doughnut charts in Bold BI and to better understand how to use its properties to present your data.
Tips for using a doughnut chart
- Keep it simple: Limit the number of categories of data to make the chart concise and easier to interpret.
- Use labels: Include data labels showing the exact values of each section to enable viewers to understand the data clearly.
- Emphasize data points: Highlight important data points by using contrasting colors to attract attention.
- Avoid overlapping text: Consider adjusting the size of the chart to prevent overlapping of the text.
- Provide context: Add a brief description to provide context and assist viewers in understanding the purpose and significance of the chart.
- Avoid 3D effects: Stick to 2D doughnut charts for better accuracy, as 3D charts can distort the data and make it difficult to interpret.
Real-time use cases of a doughnut chart
Education: Enrollment by Gender
In this education metric, the doughnut chart depicts the proportional display of male and female students in a single chart. It provides a quick visual comparison, highlighting potential gender imbalances in enrollment and assisting educational institutions in making informed decisions for encouraging gender equity.
Healthcare: Patient Feedback by Type
Healthcare activities can be effectively presented using doughnut charts. They can display satisfaction levels over various time periods, revealing trends in patient experience, allowing healthcare professionals to make timely improvements for enhanced patient care.
Sales: Closed Opportunities by Stage
This example widget showcases a doughnut chart in a sales department dashboard. The ring displays closed opportunities, with the type of closed deal displayed proportionate to the total. This visualization allows sales teams and managers to swiftly grasp their performance, identify potential gaps, and make informed decisions to enhance the sales process for higher conversion rates.
Manufacturing: Downtime Causes
Manufacturers can use doughnut charts like the previous one to visualize the causes of lost production time, such as equipment failure, maintenance, shortages, and human error. This allows managers to note common causes, allocate resources, and execute precise solutions, promoting manufacturing efficiency and productivity.
Finance: Payment Status
Doughnut charts can be used to display financial activities like paid, pending, overdue, and default for quick assessment of a business’s financial health. It enables analysts and managers to identify concerns, enabling proactive actions on overdue accounts and promoting better cash flow management.
Government: Grant Application Progress
This Grant Application Progress metric illustrates how a government dashboard can use a doughnut chart to represent the percentage of grant applications received, approved, and pending visually. This visualization enables quick understanding of the overall process, allowing administrators to monitor efficiency and identify potential bottlenecks, leading to enhanced resource allocation.
Pharmaceutical Analytics: Workforce Age Composition
This doughnut chart illustrates workforce composition in a pharmaceutical analytics dashboard, portraying the proportional representation of various age groups employed in a pharmaceutical company. This visual aims at understanding team dynamics and experience level distribution.
In conclusion, doughnut charts are flexible data visualization tools, displaying data distribution concisely and attractively. Their capacity to convey essential metrics across multiple contexts, like finance and resource management, empowers informed choices, promoting business success.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on October 11, 2023.
