Combine scalars in one variable to make a scatter plot

[Marie Jansens]

Hi,

I have 7 scalars which represent the means of the years of education for each time period. I want to combine these 7 scalars in a variable so that I can make a scatter plot of the means of education on the y-axis and the time period on the x-axis. I do not find a way to combine the 7 scalars in a variable. Can someone help me out?

[Nick Cox]

That could be done but the more usual way to do it would be to use egen, mean() to put the means in a variable directly.

[Marie Jansens]

I have different variables for which I calculated the mean and I put them into scalars because otherwise the variable duplicated the value for all the observations and that is not what I needed. But know I have to combine the scalars in a variable to use them in a scatter plot but I do not know how I can do this.

[Nick Cox]

It is indeed inefficient to store a mean repeatedly in a variable but for graphical purposes that often works fine. But I still don't see that you need to do anything like what you're describing.

Here is a silly example of means of something by year.

. webuse grunfeld, clear

. egen mean = mean(invest), by(year)

. line mean year if company == 1, sort

If that doesn't help, please post a minimal data example and sufficient code to make clear what you are doing.

[Hemanshu Kumar]

You can also the immediate version of the scatterplot command to plot scalars directly; see

help twoway scatteri

[Marie Jansens]

Twoway scatteri was exactly what I was looking for! Thank you very much!