Let’s go back to Data Viz basics and related good practices.
“I understand, you like pie charts but let me propose you an alternative before deciding”
I’ve had to say this sentence many times, and I imagine you have too. So, here’s how I usually replace that pie chart with a bar chart using Looker Studio modern-ized charts.
Turning pie chart into bar chart
- Switch to horizontal stacked bar chart
- Add the same dimension as the Breakdown dimension in the Setup tab
Removing the unnecessary elements
- Turn off the legend in the style tab
- Change axis color to background color
- Hide Left Y-axis label
Making dimension values readable
- Resize the bars area to give more spaces to dimension labels
- Adapt the font size and put in bold the labels of Y-Axis (using X-Axis style panels)
For horizontal bar, “surprisingly” you need to adapt X options to change for real Y styles…It seems that pivoting view is not taken in account to adapt Axis style options in the UI. One of the current bugs in the chart edition.
Highlighting data labels
- Turn off X-axis gridlines in the grid section
- Turn on the data labels
- Adapt the font size and the position of the label
- In the Setup tab, change the display format of the metric to “Percent (1)” and the comparison calculation to “Percent of total”
Bonus: Access to absolute values
More? Adding interaction to display the related absolute value?
- Turn on the chart header at the bottom of the Style tab
- Turn on the optional metrics in the Setup tab
- Add the same metric without changing any option
- Rename the main metric to differentiate the % value & the absolute value
Final result
Voilà, your bar chart is ready: Clearer, more readable regardless of the fluctuations of the shares for each dimension value.
