How to Lie With Charts

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.


Interesting, but not the best   March 26, 2000
M. Broderick (Oklahoma City, OK USA)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

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.


Excellent resource for algebra, precalc and computers   May 13, 2002
R. Kelly Wagner (MD, United States)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful

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.


Want to Learn How to Recognize a Deceptive Presentation?   August 18, 2002
M. Bennett
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Are you tired of watching managements', employees' or politicians' deceptive presentation with graphs? Do you want to call their bluff? "How to Lie with Charts" is your secret weapon. This book along side with Darrell Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics" gives you all the amunition you need to cut through those presentations that create optical illusions.

The author explains all of the various charts available, their characteristics and how people alter their graphic works of art to influence the audience to buy into whatever the presentor wishes.

Not only does the author talk about the graphs but he explores the area of our subconcious and how this strongly influence our positive or negative perception of a chart.

The book goes into great detail and is quite humorous. The only cirticism that I have about this book is located in chapter 10. The author talks about the importance of color and how it influences the audience but he explains all of this in black and white. If you are going to encourge people to use color presentations and graphs, stop being such a tight wad and use color in your own book. Explaining tones, shades, etc., in fuzzy gray color doesn't do the job. Practice what you preach. Use color to explain color.


Content fine, format hard to read   June 20, 2001
This has potential to be a great book; the ideas and examples are excellent. I teach introductory stats and there's more than enough here to keep everyone interested and amused. Unfortunately the book's presentation is second-rate. While pages are large the text is insufficiently enlarged, leaving wide white margins around a small, cramped text. Diagrams are smudged and hard to read. This cheap reproduction detracts from an otherwise good book.