Hi Leonard,
I believe it is the duty of a good program to *warn* the user when he
takes the wrong decision. Let the 3D charts sit there, BUT when a user
selects one for use, warn him about this and offer an explanation, why
a third dimension is not desirable. I would also suggest to ask a
number of high-ranking statisticians to wright this explanation, so
that - at least some of the users - would abandon the 3D chart use.
You cannot be earnest, that a warning dialog pops up every time a user
choses a 3d type. If we think 3d is bad, we should drop it, otherwise it
should be ok. What impression will a user get when we offer him a
feature and then bother him by a dialog saying "Don't use that!".
Reminds me of a restaurant visit, where a friend ordered something and
the chef said: "Oh I wouldn't recommend than, take something else".
e.g. Tell me please, which is bigger, 'Column B' or 'Column C':
<< removed image screenshot from old chart >>
I am not wondering. It was my first guess when seing this chart. But
this example is unfair. 1. This is the old chart, not the new one (I
thought we were talking about the new chart here). In the new chart the
angle is different. 2. The light green and light yellow are quite
similar, so you might see them as one piece, and therefore think the
yellow piece is bigger.
There are a number of problems even with the standard pie-chart (2D).
I mentioned one in my first post.
- very small values are NOT easily displayed and NOT easy to see
Then don't use them. Should we also warn a user when he types text in
Writer and selects a 5pt font that this might be too small? We usually
imply that our users are not totally dumb.
BTW., in Excel there is this cool new feature where you have little bars
in cells showing a kind of bar chart inside the sheet. They decided to
make the bars at least 10% wide, even if the values just make 1% or
0,1%. I would be concerned more about this kind of faking statistics
than about correct statistics that you cannot read well. As I also said
before: doing charts is not an easy task, most people fail to select the
right data to show in the first place. OOo chart cannot help here. It is
just a tool to realize the ideas you have in a visual form.
Therefore I would recommend putting some effort into solving this problem.
My opinion: waste of time.
I would also like to be able to rotate (clockwise or counter-clockwise
in 2D, NOT 3D) the pie chart (this is especially useful, when one
wants to align 2 pie charts). Also, I would sometimes want to swap 2
segments.
I can understand this requirement. You are not the first one (there
should exist an issue for this).
Another problem are charts with negative values. I wanted recently to
create a pie chart, highlighting the difference between 2 groups (2
pie charts), so I created the difference between the proportions. SOme
were positive, some were negative. I would have welcomed a mechanism
to automatically group the positive proportions vs the negative
proportions (they must sum up to 0, so both groups would have occupied
half of the piechart). Instead, the values were used as absolute
values AND therefore were intermixed, bringing NO meaning.
This doesn't sound like a very common thing to do. You are always free
to regroup your data in a sheet and create a chart out of that. The
chart cannot fulfill every wish anyone might have. And things like "they
must sum up to 0": what should the chart do if this is not the case? Pop
up a dialog: "Sorry, your data doesn't fit me. What you see may be garbage"?
There are many other issues that could be improved.
Really? Never would have thought of that. Sorry, this is not very
helpful advice.
BTW: THERE IS NO REASON TO *SHOUT* HERE !!!!
Regards,
Björn
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