Printable builder · Landscape · 1 page

The Rose Chart

A one-page rose chart — a polar area diagram, the kind Florence Nightingale made famous — the mirror image of a pie. On a pie the slice's angle carries the value and every slice reaches the same distance out; here every wedge takes an equal slice of the circle and the value is carried by how far it reaches from the centre. That swap is exactly what you want when the thing you're plotting runs around a cycle, because then the position on the dial means something in itself: the twelve months of a year, the seven days of a week, the twenty-four hours of a day, the points of a compass. Laid out this way the shape tells the story at a glance — a fat lobe where the summer rain falls, a lean stretch across the quiet weekend, a spike at the morning rush — the way a plain row of bars, stripped of its circle, never quite does. The biggest value fills the outer ring and the rest scale against it, dotted rings mark the scale, each wedge is labelled around the rim, and the peak category is called out to the side with the sector count and running total. It works best for a value measured once for each step around a repeating cycle — rainfall or sales by month, focus hours or steps by day, calls or traffic by hour, wind or moves by direction. List a label and its value per line and the wedges fan out, size, colour and label themselves; leave it blank to print an empty dial and shade it in by hand.