FAQ: Different Plot Types - Pie Chart

[wiki-bot]

This community-built FAQ covers the “Pie Chart” exercise from the lesson “Different Plot Types”.

Paths and Courses
This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Data Visualization in Python

FAQs on the exercise Pie Chart

• In the context of this exercise, can we change the colors of a pie chart?

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[precel2000]

Why does pyplot draw a pie chart that appears tilted as the default?

[method2021067789]

Please don’t use pie charts in your professional life. Humans are terrible at eyeballing proportions. Pie charts are only effective with heavy labeling, in which case you may as well just tabulate the percentages of each category.

[corepro76625]

I also would like to know this, from my point of view, if anything a tilted chart should be an option, not the norm. Maybe there’s something we’re not seeing here?

[ramtob]

Is this phenomenon, that the pyplot pie chart appears tilted by default, a feature of the Codecademy environment (codecademylib library)? I haven’t seen allusions to this pie tilting phenomenon anywhere else. Also, in the w3schools environment the tilting doesn’t happen, and without calling plt.axis().

[lisalisaj]

I can’t see what lesson this is referring to b/c this post is from 2018 and that content has been moved.

When in doubt, check the documentation:

https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/pie_and_polar_charts/pie_and_donut_labels.html

[ramtob]

This lesson

[lisalisaj]

Well, did you try creating a chart outside the CC LE? (in Jupyter Notebook).

Adding a title has nothing to do with plt.axis(). You have to use plt.title("blah")

[ramtob]

I didn’t write anything about title. Could you be confounding title with tilted?

Ok, now I’ve checked it also outside CCLE, and my hypothesis seems to have been confirmed.

When I run this code

import codecademylib
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
payment_method_names = ["Card Swipe", "Cash", "Apple Pay", "Other"]
payment_method_freqs = [270, 77, 32, 11]
#make your pie chart here
plt.pie(payment_method_freqs, labels=payment_method_names)
# plt.axis('equal')
plt.show()

in the lesson (CCLE) I get a tilted pie chart:

When I run the same code (with only commenting out import codecademylib) outside CCLE, in VSCode, I get a non-tilted pie chart:

This seems to confirm that it is CCLE and/or codecademylib that are causing the pie chart to be tilted (unequal axes).

What do you think?

[lisalisaj]

Oh, jeez. You’re right! I’m so sorry about that. ::face_palm::

This library-- import codecademylib–has special settings. They do that from time to time in certain lessons. I’ve also seen it with Seaborn. Rather than importing the Seaborn library, they import their own lib w/special settings.