Multiple background colors on one two-way graph

[Wei Chen]

Dear all,

My question is simple, but I cannot find a proper google keyword to search for it.
Basically. I have a simple time series data, say it is the exchange rate b/w USD and EURO each day in a year.
Now, besides drawing a line graph to present the data, I want to put 4 different background colors which represent 4 seasons in a year under the graph.
By dosing so, the reader would be able to easily tell which part is which season. (This is just an example, in my data each "season" has different length in each year.)
I have a variable called season which equals to 1 if it is spring, 2 if it is summer and so on.
How should I do this? Thank you.

[Laura Gibbons]

There may be a more elegant way, but I handle this sort of thing by overlaying a series of scatter plots, one with season==1, another with season==2, etc. I use a different marker color for each plot.

[E. David Aja]

Something like this might help: http://www.stata.com/statalist/archi.../msg00121.html