I build BI products for a living and used to get into a lot of pedantic arguments about whether a pie chart or worse, the dreaded 3d bar or line plot, should ev

I build BI products for a living and used to get into a lot of pedantic arguments about whether a pie chart or worse, the dreaded 3d bar or line plot, should ever be used. Eventually I had to give it up though as it's not a productive use of time to try and pry beloved bad visualizations away from business users, plus I sensed I was starting to become a stephen fewesque curmudgen. They haven't reasoned their way into liking them so you can't reason them out of it most of the time. Instead I'm focusing on building tools that show data in better ways first, but let you get to other options if you really want to giving viewers you share views with a way to quickly switch back to something easier to grok. Even initially graphically purist tools like Tableau have had to go this route and you can now find nightmarish packed bubble plots and the like in there. In modern visualization there are so many worse visualizations that have crept in that arguing about the pie chart seems almost quaint to me at this point. For example check out this flying 3d globe with bar chart where the bars point directly up (at the camera) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/power-map.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/power-map.aspx - A while back someone from Microsoft demonstrated this to me and after I gave him a hard time about it being an improper way plot geographic data he retorted "The world is round you know!" edit: formatting