Charts vs Numbers

Charts vs Numbers

Posted May 26, 2006 17:32 UTC (Fri) by amazingblair (subscriber, #2789)
In reply to: Coming soon: GnuCash 2.0 by Lorenzo
Parent article: Coming soon: GnuCash 2.0

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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