This discussion of 3-d pie charts comes at an opportune time. I have just formulated a new theory of graphical information transfer which is particularly simple in the case of 3-d pie charts.
Let theta denote the angle between the normal to the pie cylinder and the pie-eyed line (connecting eye and centre of pie). Then the information transmitted from pie to viewer is K * (pi/2 - theta)^3 for theta in [0, pi/2]. The normalizing constant may be written in the obvious manner as K = 8 * I_0 / pi^3. I conjecture that I_0 is not large, but I'm still waiting to hear from Microsoft regarding my application for funding to allow me to conduct extensive testing. I'm also working on higher-dimensional generalizations, but even the 4-d case does not seem to be simple. Peter Ehlers Frank E Harrell Jr wrote: > Rolf Turner wrote: > >>Gabor Grothendieck wrote: >> >> >> >>>Since everyone else wimped out with a tedious you-do-not-want-to-do-that, >>>here is a solution that uses R to control Excel and create a 3d chart. >> >> . >> . >> . >> >>People really ***should not*** be encouraged or abetted in >>wrong-headedness. Excel is terrible. Pie charts are terrible. >>Don't mess with them. Period. >> >> >> cheers, >> >> Rolf Turner >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > I second that. Helping people do things known to have major problems > with the approaches can actually hurt others in the long run. 2-D pie > charts are terrible. That makes 3-D pie charts terrible to the 3/2 > power. Excel has serious errors and is not a good model for > reproducible research. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html