5 Ways to Get Pie Charts into InDesign
In an analytical world, pie charts can help
to serve up your data in a tasty way.
Everyone likes pie (charts), right? Pie charts are one of the most common methods of visually representing data. Not only are they visually pleasing, but they help readers to easily understand the information in a logical, intuitive way.
InDesign doesn’t natively contain a tool you can use to create pie charts directly. That doesn’t mean that you’re out of luck, though. When it comes to creating pie charts in InDesign, I’ve seen a number of different approaches, and I’d like to show you five different ways that you can get pie charts into an InDesign document, each with their own benefits and downfalls depending on your workflow.
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In general best option is not to use pie charts at all.
Some projects require charts and graphs, including pie charts. And Chad’s article is a great resource for anyone who needs to get them into InDesign.
Curious … why do you say no pie charts …?
Pie charts are poor representations of data. They are often used to obscure rather than clarify.
The data in pie charts is represented in areas (the pie wedges), as opposed to length (such as in bar charts, column charts, and even line graphs). It is much harder for the human mind to determine small differences in areas than small differences in lengths. In pie charts with similar size wedges the wedges often have to be labeled with the percentages for you to be able to tell the difference in their sizes. Anything smaller than 15-degrees is extremely hard to differentiate. (Perhaps that’s why the numbers on analog clocks are at 15-degree increments.)
Pie charts are pretty, but do an awful job of displaying data. I tell students to only use pie charts for one of three reasons:
1. Your boss (or teacher/professor) requires you to use pie charts.
2. You want a pretty graphic and don’t care about the data.
3. You want to obscure the data.
Interesting piece on the pros and cons of pie charts: https://priceonomics.com/should-you-ever-use-a-pie-chart/
What about working in Deltagraph and exporting in eps – small correction needed in Illustrator? Deltagraph is the real pro solution. I’ve made thousands of graphs of any kind in that software (poor me).
I’ve not worked with Deltagraph Serge.
By the way, thanks to Chad for those quick solutions I didn’t know !
If you have excel why use bizzarre solutions ? Excel have everything what y need – just import to indesign – pice of cake.
Not bizarre solutions, just alternative. Excel doesn’t give all users the options that they need.