Last month, I delivered a 90-minute talk in SAS’s beautiful, state-of-the-art auditorium at their North Carolina headquarters. That talk was webcast live and, rather astonishingly, over 4,000 people registered to watch it and many more have watched a recording of it since it was made freely available on SAS’s site.

I recently contributed an article to SAS’s JMP Foreword magazine, entitled “All charts are biased, but some are useful.” In it, I challenge the common misconception that charts can ever be truly neutral or unbiased, and propose that we should, instead, strive to create the most useful chart for a given situation.