Data Visualization - are pie-charts evil ?

I'll be speaking next week at the Supply Chain Management Conference at the University of Arkansas on how data-visualization enables action.   

Good visualization is fairly easy, unfortunately, building bad visualizations that are hard to use, easy to misunderstand and that obscure and distort the data you are trying to present is even easier - many analysts can do it without trying to.



In honor of the event, I'm resurrecting a post I created a couple of years ago "Are pie charts evil or just misunderstood".  I wrote this around  the time I was moving away from a trial and error approach  (and 20 years of trial and error effort does get you cleaner visuals) to attempting to understand why some visuals so clearly work better than others.  

It turns out that there are some great frameworks to help in building better visuals.  Join me next week and we'll talk about human graphical perception, chart junk and non-data ink.

Enjoy !