R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Making better, readable pie charts with clockwise-ordered slices

Pie charts are very popular in business data reporting. However, they are not preferred by scientists and are often criticized for being hard to read and obscuring data. In this recipe, we will learn how to make better pie charts by ordering the slices by size.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will use the browsers.txt example dataset that contains data about the usage percentage share of different Internet browsers.

How to do it...

First, we will load the browsers.txt dataset and then use the pie() function to draw a pie chart:

browsers<-read.table("browsers.txt",header=TRUE) browsers<-browsers[order(browsers[,2]),] pie(browsers[,2], labels=browsers[,1], clockwise=TRUE, radius=1, col=brewer.pal(7,"Set1"), ...