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Coming soon: GnuCash 2.0

Coming soon: GnuCash 2.0

Posted May 25, 2006 15:43 UTC (Thu) by Lorenzo (guest, #260)
Parent article: Coming soon: GnuCash 2.0

I'm still a Quicken (2006) user ... on Win2K, on a well-worn P3/500. I've been a Quicken user for so long I cannot remember; it must have been the early '90s. Frankly, that's about all that P3/500 does. Would that there were a Linux hosted personal finance thingie that's really usable, OFX and all.

A question for the users of personal finance software: Does anyone actually think that a pie chart is helpful for anything besides eye-candy?


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Coming soon: GnuCash 2.0

Posted May 26, 2006 1:13 UTC (Fri) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

Yes, pie charts are great. If I want to know the figures I'll look in the
ledgers, but pie charts are great for getting a gut feel for where all
your money's going to, and which areas are ripe for cut-backs.

Charts vs Numbers

Posted May 26, 2006 17:32 UTC (Fri) by amazingblair (subscriber, #2789) [Link]

You question the truism, "A picture is worth a thousand words"? To re-phrase, "A chart is worth a thousand numbers".

As an internal financial analyst for a small company, I used the numbers as data and the charts as the results with which to communicate the data. That's all a pie-chart is: a quick summary of one aspect of the data, viz, the proportion of each category to the whole.

For example, in a home budget, a pie-chart is a quick way to visualize where you are spending most of your discetionary money. It just takes longer to extract that information from a screenful of figures. The figures are where you go for the details, the chart for the overview.

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