Speaking Stata: Between tables and graphs

Table-like graphs can be interesting, useful, and even mildly innovative. This column outlines some Stata techniques for producing such graphs. graph dot is likely to be the most under-appreciated command among all existing commands. Using by() with various choices is a good way to mimic a categorical axis in many graph commands. When graph bar or graph dot is not flexible enough to do what you want, moving to the more flexible twoway is usually advisable. labmask and seqvar are introduced as new commands useful for preparing axis labels and axis positions for categorical variables. Applications of these ideas to, e.g., confidence interval plots lies ahead.