{"id":20863,"date":"2008-09-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-16T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/09\/16\/the-purpose-of-charts-is-normally-to-make-information-easier-not-harder-to-understand\/"},"modified":"2008-09-16T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-16T10:00:00","slug":"the-purpose-of-charts-is-normally-to-make-information-easier-not-harder-to-understand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20080916-00\/?p=20863","title":{"rendered":"The purpose of charts is normally to make information easier, not harder, to understand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a presentation a few years ago, there was a pie chart, but not just any pie chart, but a pie chart that appeared to be specifically designed to convey no information whatsoever. (The presenter didn&#8217;t realize this, of course, and probably thought it was awesomely cool.)<\/p>\n<p> The pie chart consisted of five wedges, each of which was a slightly different shade of green. No, wait, that&#8217;s not right. Each wedge was a <i>gradient<\/i> from a common shade of green to a slightly different shade of green for each wedge. Accompanying the chart was a legend that described what each shade of green represented. It was completely useless. (Inspired by this story, my friend <a href=\"http:\/\/wendyhome.com\/\"> ::&nbsp;Wendy&nbsp;::<\/a> created <a href=\"http:\/\/wendyhome.com\/2007\/09\/07\/excel-explains-5-drinkies-and-pies\/\"> her own monochromatic pie chart<\/a>.) <\/p>\n<p> If you&#8217;re going to make a chart with a legend, then the items labelled by the legend should be colors which are unlikely to be confused with each other. And for goodness&#8217; sake, don&#8217;t make them all subtly different shades of the same base color. (For bonus points, consider the color-blind members of your audience. And for double bonus points, also consider the blind members of your audience. But that&#8217;s another topic for another day.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a presentation a few years ago, there was a pie chart, but not just any pie chart, but a pie chart that appeared to be specifically designed to convey no information whatsoever. (The presenter didn&#8217;t realize this, of course, and probably thought it was awesomely cool.) The pie chart consisted of five wedges, each [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-20863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>In a presentation a few years ago, there was a pie chart, but not just any pie chart, but a pie chart that appeared to be specifically designed to convey no information whatsoever. (The presenter didn&#8217;t realize this, of course, and probably thought it was awesomely cool.) The pie chart consisted of five wedges, each [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}