Overview (IGRAPH command)

The interactive Chart Editor is designed to emulate the experience of drawing a statistical chart with a pencil and paper. The Chart Editor is a highly interactive, direct manipulation environment that automates the data manipulation and drawing tasks required to draw a chart by hand, such as determining data ranges for axes; drawing ticks and labels; aggregating and summarizing data; drawing data representations such as bars, boxes, or clouds; and incorporating data dimensions as legends when the supply of dependent axes is exhausted.

The IGRAPH command creates a chart in an interactive environment. The interactive Chart Editor allows you to make extensive and fundamental changes to this chart instead of creating a new chart. The Chart Editor allows you to replace data, add new data, change dimensionality, create separate chart panels for different groups, or change the way data are represented in a chart (that is, change a bar chart into a boxplot). The Chart Editor is not a “typed” chart system. You can use chart elements in any combination, and you are not limited by “types” that the application recognizes.

To create a chart, you assign data dimensions to the domain (independent) and range (dependent) axes to create a “data region.” You also add data representations such as bars or clouds to the data region. Data representations automatically position themselves according to the data dimensions assigned to the data region.

There is no required order for assigning data dimensions or adding data representations; you can add the data dimensions first or add the data representations first. When defining the data region, you can define the range axis first or the domain axis first.

Options

Titles and Captions. You can specify a title, subtitle, and caption for the chart.

Chart Type. You can request a specific type of chart using the BAR, PIE, BOX, LINE, ERRORBAR, HISTOGRAM, and SCATTERPLOT subcommands.

Chart Content. You can combine elements in a single chart. For example, you can add error bars to a bar chart.

Chart Legends. You can specify either scale legends or categorical legends. Moreover, you can specify whether a color or style is used to distinguish the legend variables.

Chart Appearance. You can specify a template, using the CHARTLOOK subcommand, to override the default chart attribute settings.

Basic Specification

The minimum syntax to create a graph is simply the IGRAPH command, without any variable assignment. This will create an empty graph. To create an element in a chart, a dependent variable must be assigned and a chart element specified.

Subcommand Order

  • Subcommands can be used in any order.

Syntax Rules

  • EFFECT=THREE and COORDINATE=THREE cannot be specified together. If they are, the EFFECT keyword will be ignored.

Operations

  • The chart title, subtitle, and caption are assigned as they are specified on the TITLE, SUBTITLE, and CAPTION subcommands. In the absence of any of these subcommands, the missing title, subtitle, or caption are null.