Piechart reference a joke? [LWN.net]

Piechart reference a joke?

Posted May 24, 2006 15:31 UTC (Wed) by ber (subscriber, #2142)
Parent article: Coming soon: GnuCash 2.0

What strikes me as odd is the piechart image and the reference to the feature itself. A few years ago I wrote a small piechart application and when I went to the library to find out how excellent piecharts should be made, I found out that they are a bad idea unless you want to hide information.

Since then my application prints out a Warning.

Given that people who actually try to manage their own money should be interested in a good way to visulise quantities, request for an animated piechart feature almost seem to be a joke.

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Piechart reference a joke?

Posted May 25, 2006 9:36 UTC (Thu) by wingo (subscriber, #26929) [Link]

Regarding the origins of that particular piechart:

http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2003-Mar...

I believe "heavily-requested animated piechart feature" is our editor's variety of humor :)

Hide information with a Piechart?

Posted May 26, 2006 17:48 UTC (Fri) by amazingblair (subscriber, #2789) [Link]

ber,

I must disagree with your contention that piecharts are only used to hide information. Piecharts are used to emphasize one aspect of the underlying data, specifically, the proportion of the parts compared to the whole; how big a slice of the pie. It is well suited to that task.

However, by definition you cannot emphasize one aspect without de-emphasizing others: in the case of the piechart, you lose sight of the quantities by focusing on the proportions. Is this perhaps what you mean by "hiding information"? That is a specious objection, since the pie chart does not replace the numbers, it merely summarizes on easpect of them. Nothing stops you from supplying another chart of another type that summarizes another aspect of the data if you seek further clarity.

As I state in another comment further down, the numbers are for detail, the chart is the overview.