Nice to be vindicated by academic research, even though the conclusion seems blindingly obvious – if you want to reveal the truth, present the numbers in a table, if you want to conceal it and highlight a misleading tendency, present the data in a pretty graph or chart (as an example, if A had 60% of the market last year, 58% this year, B had 30% last year, 29% this year, but C has doubled its share to 6% from 3%, the only interesting trend is the last, but if you present the data as a pie chart, hardly anyone will notice it): Iris Vessey, an associate professor of information systems at Pennsylvania State University has been studying the craze for letting style win out over substance, and according to the Wall Street Journal, found that many people felt more comfortable turning to a row of numbers on a table than comparing lines on a graph.
