Ah, the famous pie charts! They are widely used to show the portion that each category represents.
1. What Issues Do They Present?
Many people are hesitant to use them because human perception can lead to a misleading representation of categories. Large portions often appear bigger than they actually are, while very small ones can seem even smaller. Likewise, when a medium portion is placed next to smaller ones, it may look larger than it is.
Continuing with the examples, I will keep using the dataset of top movies from 2019. You can visit the post on how to add charts to your report in Looker Studio, if you need a refresher.
2. Example
The image in the example shows the percentage of revenue by Top Genre 1 for the movies in our dataset.

To create it, after adding the pie chart, you need to select Top Genre 1 as the dimension and Revenue as the metric in the chart configuration.

As you can see, Animation represented 23%, followed by Superhero at nearly 18% and Action at 10.6%.
By default, the pie chart shows 10 segments, but you can increase it to 20 within Style.

Here you can see the same visualisation but showing all the genres in the dataset, as I have increased the chart’s segments.

2. Specific Customisation Options for the Chart
This chart can be displayed with a hollow circle in the center. The size of this can be adjusted to the point where the final chart is just a circular line.


What’s Your Opinion on Pie Charts? Do you like using them to represent the weight of categories? They have many detractors due to the reasons explained at the beginning of the post, but that doesn’t stop them from being one of the most used visualisations.
As always, comments and questions are welcome! 🙂