Dear Stata users,
I ran into a problem today that has been bothering me. I was making a bar chart, and when I was writing the sort() suboption inside the over() option, I accidentally misspelled a variable name. As you can imagine, I didn't get the sorted bar chart I wanted. But what's worth noting is that Stata still produced a bar chart every time — it just wasn't sorted. So I kept adjusting things over and over, but I still couldn't get the correct bar chart. In the end, I discovered that I had misspelled the variable name, and that variable didn't even exist in the dataset. So naturally, sort didn't produce the ordering I wanted. But here's the question: this was a variable that doesn't exist at all — why didn't Stata throw an error? Why did it just ignore the problem and output the graph as if nothing had happened?
I ran into a problem today that has been bothering me. I was making a bar chart, and when I was writing the sort() suboption inside the over() option, I accidentally misspelled a variable name. As you can imagine, I didn't get the sorted bar chart I wanted. But what's worth noting is that Stata still produced a bar chart every time — it just wasn't sorted. So I kept adjusting things over and over, but I still couldn't get the correct bar chart. In the end, I discovered that I had misspelled the variable name, and that variable didn't even exist in the dataset. So naturally, sort didn't produce the ordering I wanted. But here's the question: this was a variable that doesn't exist at all — why didn't Stata throw an error? Why did it just ignore the problem and output the graph as if nothing had happened?
Code:
sysuse educ99gdp, clear generate total = private + public graph hbar (asis) public private, over(country, sort(total) descending) stack name(g1, replace) graph hbar (asis) public private, over(country, sort(toal) descending) stack name(g2, replace) graph combine g1 g2
Code:
sort(varname) put bars in prespecified order sort(#) put bars in height order sort((stat) varname) put bars in derived order
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