Talk:Harvey balls

PowerPoint Unicode
Regarding:

"The use of Unicode to render Harvey Balls has the benefit of not requiring a font to be installed, however the Unicode Harvey Balls are more difficult to work with in presentation software such as Powerpoint and are not rendered uniformly."

Has it been tested that PowerPoint does not render them uniformly? It sounds like an opinion. Knightdaemon (talk) 19:33, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Tested the Unicode versions in PowerPoint:mac 2008 (v.12.2.3 (091001)) and they are not rendered uniformly - the sizes of the balls are rendered differently on the screen at the same font size. If you adjust the font size to make the ball sizes uniform then they are no longer aligned vertically. 60.240.36.122 (talk) 00:09, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

I know this is old, and that may not even be in the article anymore, but the statement is not that they are not rendered uniformly in PowerPoint. Unicode is not rendered uniformly. Some fonts may render them in a way that makes them not Harvey Balls at all.

Michael Niemann (talk) 02:21, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Weather and Other Symbols
The article implies that the weather community, astronomy community, etc. adopted the Harvey Balls. I clicked to the reference and it displayed the symbols and their meanings but didn't seem to include a history. It seems likely that these symbols were already in use in some of these fields prior to Harvey Poppel's use of them. And, in any case, I think the definition of a Harvey Ball would be limited to the use of these symbols for qualitative comparisons and adaptations. It might be more accurate to say something like "some of the symbols used for Harvey Balls are also used in other fields to represent other types of information...". Then it could go into the discussion of those other fields. The point is that at least some of these symbols existed previously. Poppel chose them for a new use and/or reinvented them for his use.

This is my first ever comment in Wikipedia. Thanks for the original article; very interesting and well-written. Nycmeg (talk) 02:50, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Harvey Balls or Harvey ball
I have reverted the change of name for the article from "Harvey Balls" to "Harvey ball". The proper name for Harvey Balls is "Harvey Balls" -- this is standard industry usage, and the inventor himself referred to them as such (see link). AWN2 (talk) 12:12, 14 October 2011 (UTC)


 * WP:NAME - Wikipedia Manual of Style is important rather than industry usage. "Harvey" is capitalised as it comes from a name, but "balls" is merely descriptive. "Harvey balls" is not a proper noun so is not capitalised overall. Mauls (talk) 16:45, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Use in Popular Publishing
As of Sept. 20, 2016, Consumer Reports has stopped using Harvey Balls to convey their 5-level attribute scores. (see this ). Rich S 10001 (talk) 17:43, 23 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Fixed reference in the SVG image to Consumer Reports as "former" use. MeekMark (talk) 17:36, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

How to read the symbols
This article doesn't describe how to interpret the balls. Aka is full black or full white map to 100% connection? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.179.152.74 (talk) 19:00, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Oh how I second that notion. We've run into both ends of ambiguity with different presentation crowds now. 193.202.20.8 (talk) 08:24, 26 September 2017 (UTC)


 * I was wondering the same thing; spurred by a "Death by PowerPoint" at work today. So I came here to figure it out.  Likely it depends on what organization is using it...
 * MeekMark (talk) 17:31, 16 July 2024 (UTC)