Visualizing Proportions

This chapter discusses how to represent the individual categories and provides the bigger picture of how each choice relates to the other. Proportion data is grouped by categories, subcategories and population. For proportions, one usually looks for three things: maximum, minimum, and the overall distribution. Charts are needed to show the distribution of proportions. In a pie chart, each wedge represents a part of the whole. The donut chart is like a pie chart, but with a hole cut out in the middle so that it looks like a donut. Protovis can be used to create an interactive stacked bar chart or a donut chart. If there are several time series charts, each line should be stacked on top of the other. After the empty space is filled a stacked area chart is derived. Illustrator doesn't have a Treemap tool, but has a R package called Portfolio.