Commands to colour the bars in a bar chart individually

[Walter Dallaway]

I use

graph bar, over(myVar)

to create a bar chart. The bars have all the same color except when I select in the graph editor the bar region option "Cycle through over categories...", but even then the colors are just set somehow - and I get a legend (I do not want) instead of labels on the axis.

I would like to specify a scheme of maybe 3-4 colors the bars cycle through. Any way to do this via options to the graph bar command or similar? That is more reproducible than via the graph edtor.

Many thanks,
Walter

[Marcos Almeida]

Hello Walter,

Welcome to the Stata Forum!

You may wish to take a look at the "lookofbar_options".

From the help files:

bar(#, barlook_options) specifies the look of the yvar bars. bar(1, ...) refers to the bar associated with the first yvar, bar(2, ...) refers to the bar associated with the second,
and so on. The most useful barlook_option is color(colorstyle), which sets the color of the bar. For instance, you might specify bar(1, color(green)) to make the bar associated
with the first yvar green. See [G-4] colorstyle for a list of color choices, and see [G-3] barlook_options for information on the other barlook_options.

Hopefully that helps.

Best,

Marcos

[Marcos Almeida]

Not to forget, may you just want a set of non-specified colors to "cycle through", you may add -asyvars- in the options.

[Nick Cox]

On over-use of colours, see Naomi Robbins as quoted at https://twitter.com/xangregg/status/700745391164100608

An alternative to a colouring book is no colours at all. Let the word labels be informative. That's their job.

sysuse auto, clear
graph hbar (asis) mpg if foreign, over(make, sort(1)) bar(1, bfcolor(none)) scheme(s1color)

A dot chart would be even better....

[Walter Dallaway]

Not to forget, may you just want a set of non-specified colors to "cycle through", you may add -asyvars- in the options.

Thanks Marcos. Colour-wise that's exactly what I want! My graph via

graph bar, over(q166a_ORC_graph) asyvars legend(off)

bow looks like:

However I cannot get the bars labeled like it is done without asyvars:

I do not want the legend which gets auto-generated with asyvars. How can I tell Stata to generate labels when using asyvars?

Many thanks for any pointers,
Walter

[Chen Samulsion]

I encountered same questions. Although all have been past long ago, we can bring these threads together. The best solution is refered here:

Just one trick separates you from what you want:

http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.h...iclenum=gr0049

and another similar post here: https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...play-bar-label