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Lying with Shrinking Charts
Lying with Shrinking Charts
The pyramid and cone charts should be banned from Excel. You could do without these 14
different charts, which are completely misrepresentative.
Consider a standard stacked bar chart like the top one in Figure 14.3. In this chart, a char-
ity’s administrative expenses are fairly high, at 35%. If the charity wants to minimize this in
a chart for its donors, it could change the chart to a cone or pyramid chart. Because the
chart naturally gets smaller at the top, the 35% in black looks like nothing!
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Figure 14.2
Are you supposed to look
at the back or front edge
of the 3-D columns? It
doesn’t really ...