Pareto Chart: do you use it?

Forums Workbooks and Visualizations
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Hi all,

I would like to exchange views with you about the Pareto chart; I find it very effective to show data distribution, especially to focus attention on the so-called 80-20 rule.

For example, I recently used it to highlight the distribution of commissions among the customers of a web platform which, despite being high, were concentrated in a small number of users

Here’s an example of how I rendered this type of chart on Sigma:

Sigma-ParetoChart
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Do you usually use it in your dashboards or what do you use instead?

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Added pareto

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Thank you, @nicoletta for sharing. Please definitely voice your thoughts on the Pareto chart and get the Sigma product team thinking if this is something you are interested in, especially on other use cases besides the commission, Nicoletta pointed out.

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Did not know you could do this in Sigma. I’ll definitely be looking into using them more. I like to use them to show portions of a total instead of using pie charts.

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My favorite use for them is in cohort analysis. It can help users understand what cohort is the largest driver of sales, returns, profits, etc.

I have found Pareto (or some other combo) charts to be less obvious to some users, so I think if they’re used they should be paired with a good explanation.

For example, in this screenshot, I see Arts & Entertainment as my largest cost, but also makes up 28% of my Sales. But what about comparing Music to Entertainment or Mobile? My end users would have to do some mental math to figure out if the percentage increase between all of them is the same or different. It’s tricky to see that gabs (All the arrows) are about 17%. This could be used to your advantage if you’ve got a huge outlier and you want to drive home that point.

Overall, for the right use-case and with good labels, I think they can be helpful!

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Thank you for your example katrina, very interesting

I have found Pareto (or some other combo) charts to be less obvious to some users, so I think if they’re used they should be paired with a good explanation.

I absolutely agree; I usually use it to deepen the data analysis of KPIs or other charts but it still requires to be explained to new users

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