I think some of this debate is slightly missing a key point: tables are for showing precise data, but graphics are for showing patterns. If you're expecting you

I think some of this debate is slightly missing a key point: tables are for showing precise data, but graphics are for showing patterns. If you're expecting your viewer to read accurate values off a chart, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job. If you're trying to use the same chart type to show different kinds of pattern in the same underlying data, you're probably having a "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problem. I do agree that pie charts are overused and there is often a better alternative, but do stacked sausage charts really do much better when it comes to showing differences between roughly similar values? Here's an example: http://imgur.com/zGuwg http://imgur.com/zGuwg Sure, it's obvious which red bars are longest on the left-hand side, because they have a common edge. But in that case, it's not really the length of the bars that the viewer is comparing, it's the position of the right-hand end, just like a simple bar chart. As soon as you stack thing up, so you're trying to compare sections that don't align at either end such as the green or orange bars here, it is still difficult to see which ones are longer. Something more drastic, such as reversing the order of the bars completely, throws off any comparison, as with the second and fifth lines. I don't see how a series of sausage charts like this is much better than a series of pie charts if your goal is to allow your viewer to compare the sizes of each category across the series. You need to get the key values onto the same scale to do that effectively, and I would expect a better choice to be something like a multi-bar chart (with the same zero level for each bar, either grouping all categories for each point in the series or isolating each category in a chart of its own) or perhaps some sort of overlapping line chart if the gradients are interesting.