SPSS® 12.0 Command Syntax Reference

Overview
Options
IGRAPH 745
The interactive Chart Editor is designed to emulate the experience of drawing a statistical
chart with a pencil and paper. The Chart Editor is a highly interactive, direct manipulation
environment that automates the data manipulation and drawing tasks required to draw a chart
by hand, such as determining data ranges for axes; drawing ticks and labels; aggregating and
summarizing data; drawing data representations such as bars, boxes, or clouds; and incorporating
data dimensions as legends when the supply of dependent axes is exhausted.
The IGRAPH command creates a chart in an interactive environment. The interactive
Chart Editor allows you to make extensive and fundamental changes to this chart instead of
creating a new chart. The Chart Editor allows you to replace data, add new data, change
dimensionality, create separate chart panels for different groups, or change the way data are
represented in a chart (that is, change a bar chart into a boxplot). The Chart Editor is not a
“typed” chart system. You can use chart elements in any combination, and you are not
limited by “types” that the application recognizes.
To create a chart, you assign data dimensions to the domain (independent) and range
(dependent) axes to create a “data region.” You also add data representations such as bars or
clouds to the data region. Data representations automatically position themselves according
to the data dimensions assigned to the data region.
There is no required order for assigning data dimensions or adding data representations;
you can add the data dimensions first or add the data representations first. When defining the
data region, you can define the range axis first or the domain axis first.
Titles and Captions. You can specify a title, subtitle, and caption for the chart.
Chart Type. You can request a specific type of chart using the BAR, PIE, BOX, LINE,
ERRORBAR, HISTOGRAM, and SCATTERPLOT subcommands.
Chart Content. You can combine elements in a single chart. For example, you can add error
bars to a bar chart.
Chart Legends. You can specify either scale legends or categorical legends. Moreover, you
can define which properties of the chart reflect the legend variables.
Chart Appearance. You can specify a template, using the CHARTLOOK subcommand, to
override the default chart attribute settings.
Basic Specification
The minimum syntax to create a graph is simply the IGRAPH command, without any variable
assignment. This will create an empty graph. To create an element in a chart, a dependent
variable must be assigned and a chart element specified.
Subcommand Order
• Subcommands can be used in any order.