Re: st: Suggestions for Second Edition of A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics

[David Radwin <radwin@berkeley.edu>]

At 5:45 AM -0500 7/25/07, Fred Wolfe wrote:
> Converting proportions to percentages is a frequent task. Maybe 
> adding some lines of code to do simple tasks like this would be 
> helpful.
I concur, and more generally I would like to see more examples using 
categorical data in graphs, particularly bar graphs or histograms 
comparing two or more groups. The graphs in the book generally report 
means, medians, percentages, and sums, but few if any graphs (except 
pie graphs) report percentages or proportions where the total of the 
categories (or the total within a group) add to 100% or 1.

In other words, I would like more examples analogous to -catplot- but 
with greater control over formatting.

There may not be a simple way to create such graphs. For example, 
recently I tried to produce a graph similar to the "tornado plot" or 
"population pyramid" at 
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/Library/GraphExamples/code/twobar4.htm 
(in the book's appendix) except with the values (bars) for each group 
(male and female in the above example) adding up to 100% each. I 
found that -histogram- will give you the correct shape but not enough 
control to place the labels (percentages) at the ends of the bars. 
Ultimately my solution was to -collapse- the dataset to calculate the 
percentages and then to overlap two bar and two scatter graphs, but 
the coding was not terribly elegant or efficient.

That said, this is still a great book to learn from and I am looking 
forward to the 2nd edition. Thank you for soliciting suggestions.

David
--
David Radwin, Principal Analyst // radwin@berkeley.edu
Office of Student Research, University of California, Berkeley
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