How to Lie With Charts [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Gerald Everett Jones (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The numbers donÂ’t lie...or do they? Our society relies more on visual presentation of information than ever before. By exposing the tricks of the trade, How to Lie with Charts shows you how to create effective, truthful presentations and how to spot deceptive ones.

With easy-to-understand lessons and case studies that use popular software like Microsoft PowerPoint®, you’ll learn to present information more clearly and how to avoid the pitfalls associated with automatic chart-generation tools. Discover how chart format, data placement, and even your label and color choices can influence your audience. Throughout the book, special icons point out helpful hints as well as time-consuming liars’ tricks.

An engaging book, full of real-world examples, How to Lie with Charts shows you:

• When to use pie charts and which slice of the pie is most important
• How to lay out a chart that satisfies those starving number-crunchers
• Why “liars” prefer tables to charts and some other common “liarÂ’s tips”
• The psychology of color and why blue means “reliable” to some people, but “cold” to others
• Why and where liars use the prettiest pictures

It’s not necessarily about lying—it’s about clear, persuasive communication. How to Lie with Charts teaches you to create a slide show worth watching and how to spot one worth watching out for.

About the Author

Gerald E. Jones is a freelance writer who works in book publishing, motion pictures, and video production. He is the author of Fonts: A Guide for Designers and Editors, also published by iUniverse.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: iUniverse; illustrated edition edition (July 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583487670
• ISBN-13: 978-1583487679
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,181,465 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

  #96 in

  Books > Business & Investing > Skills > Bookkeeping

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but not the best, March 25, 2000

By	M. Broderick "mikebinok" (Oklahoma City, OK USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: How to Lie With Charts (Paperback)

A better title would be HOW TO AVOID BEING FOOLED BY CHARTS AND HOW TO PREPARE CLEAR INFORMATIVE ONES. This sounds pretty dull, but it isn't. The book is readable and interesting. The subject is also an important one, at least if you depend on information from charts. It is especially valuable if you regularly prepare charts for others. The title is sort of stolen from an even better book called HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS. That is an even more valuable book which teaches some of the same lessons as this one.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resource for algebra, precalc and computers, May 13, 2002

By	R. Kelly Wagner "[e-mail]" (MD, United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: How to Lie With Charts (Paperback)

This is a very funny book, but it's also quite informative. There are discussions of each kind of graph (or "chart") that you are likely to make, particularly if you use the spreadsheet software Excel. What types of graphs are appropriate for what types of data? When should you use a pie chart? How can you emphasize one piece of data in a chart, to make it stand out from others? This book answers these questions, and more. For algebra students learning to graph things on graph paper or on the computer, this may be interesting, or even more so for the teacher, who can use some of the funnier examples as a way to spice up the subject and keep students interested.

Besides discussions of the charts themselves, the author discusses how to write and display captions, how to put charts into slides, how to make an effective slide, how to change fonts and background colors to make your chart stand out, and more.

Reading this book will also help you to discern when other people have fooled with their charts to distort them. Local newspapers, news magazines, etc. are often guilty of playing with the scale of charts, stretching things, leaving labels off of axes, and so on - you'll be able to spot these manipulations better.

I teach a college freshman course in "Quantitative Applications Software" using MS Excel; I already have a lecture I usually call "How to lie with charts and graphs" and this book will help me add more details to that lecture, which teaches students that not every graph that CAN be made, SHOULD be made. With a good graph, you should always be able to start a sentence with "This graph shows that..." and complete it with some kind of comparison.

I have but one complaint about this book: it was clearly intended to be in a smaller format; each page of writing and illustrations takes up less than half the full-size page of the book. This could have been a trade paperback, and have cost less than it does as a larger book, without losing anything except 3" of empty margin all the way around. I plan to write to the publisher, telling them I really don't like that sort of inflation. However, you may find those margins handy for scribbling notes in; uses of this book are many, so you may need the space.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to make your point with information, March 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: How to Lie With Charts (Paperback)

IF Edward Tufte might is the theoretical guru of analyzing the visual presentation of quantitative information, Gerald Jones might be the maestro of maestro of translating numbers to visuals to effectively score points against competitors.

Don't be fooled by the "Lie" in the title; the tongue-in-cheek tone of book livens up the practical nature of this book, and reflects on its mission to present facts in the most convincing, but still ethical, manner. By using popular office applications to produce the charts in the book, the information is readily translatable into solutions to everyday business challenges.

It's a great book for people who will be using facts, and presentation or spreadsheet applications, to influence decision makers.