Last week I posted an article on creating Infographics using SAS. The interest shown by the SAS community in this topic came as a surprise. Also, it so happened by coincidence, a SAS users also called into Tech Support just about the same time with a query about creating Infographics type graph
Last week Sanjay Matange wrote about a new SAS 9.4m3 option that enables you to show all categories in a graph legend, even when the data do not contain all the categories. Sanjay's example was a chart that showed medical conditions classified according to the scale "Mild," "Moderate," and "Severe."
Infographics are all the rage today. Open any magazine or newspaper and we see data and numbers everywhere. Often, such information is displayed by adding some graphical information to add context to the data. A couple of good examples are Communicating numeric information, and Facts about Hot Dogs. Riley Benson, our UX
A customer wants to use PROC REG to fit a simple regression model but display in the fit plot markers that differentiate groups of individuals. Click on a graph to enlarge. Before we see how to do that, let's look at some simpler examples. The following step fits a linear
Lo how a rose e'er blooming From tender stem hath sprung As I write this blog post, a radio station is playing Chrismas music. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the old German hymn that many of us know as "Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming." I was humming
Did you know that you can use the POLYGON statement in PROC SGPLOT to draw a map? The graph at the left shows the 48 contiguous states of the US, overlaid with markers that indicate the locations of major cities. The plot was created by using the POLYGON statement, which
Many users of ODS Graphics will be excited to learn that, beginning with SAS® 9.4 TS1M3, SG procedures are able to recognize formatted values that contain Unicode values. One benefit of this is that it allows you to include, without using annotation, special symbols such as greater-than-or-equal-to signs or Greek
Often when the data includes some extreme difference in measures or some outliers, the plot of the data points can get skewed due to the need to accommodate the extreme outliers. The bulk of the observations get squeezed into a smaller region of the plot. While this may be useful
We all want to customize our graphs just so, and have our personal preferences. Over the past few releases SG Procedures and GTL have added options to customize the look and feel of our graphs. In this article, I will describe new ways in which you can customize your legends. We will also see some
When ODS Graphics was first released with SAS 9.2 in 2008, a conscious effort was made to create graphs that were consistent and aesthetically pleasing out of the box. Features in the graph derive their visual attributes from the active Style. When Group classifications are in effect, the different classification
Sometimes different communities use the same name for different objects. To a soldier, "boots" are rugged, heavy, high-top foot coverings. To a soccer (football) player, "boots" are lightweight cleats. So it is with the term "waterfall plot." To researchers in the medical field, a "waterfall plot" is a sorted bar
A very common type of graph contains two series plot, where the user is expected to evaluate the difference visually. I saw one such plot on the web today shown on the right. This graph has two curves, one for malpractice premiums and one for claims, with a shaded band
In clinical trials, a waterfall plot is often used to indicate how patients in the study responded to treatment. In oncology trials, the response variable might be the percent change in the size of a tumor from the individual's baseline value at the start of the trial. The percent change
Back in late 2012 I discussed a technique for Conditional Highlighting, where additional attributes can be displayed in a graph. In the previous article the goal was to display a graph of Response by Year by Drug. We used a cluster grouped bar chart to create the bar chart. We
The xkcd comic often makes me think and laugh. The comic features physics, math, and statistics among its topics. Many years ago, the comic showed a "binary heart": a grid of binary (0/1) numbers with the certain numbers colored red so that they formed a heart. Some years later, I
Significant progress in reduction of Cancer mortality is shown in a graph that I noticed recently on the Cancer Network web site. This graph showed the actual and projected cancer mortality by year for males. The graph is shown on the right. The graph plots the projected and actual numbers
There has been much discussion on the SAS Communities page on usage of different symbols in a graph. The solutioin can vary based on the SAS release. New features have been added at SAS 9.4 releases to SG Procedures and GTL that make this very easy. With SAS 9.4M1, almost any combination is
Over the Christmas Holidays I saw an graph of agricultural exports to Russia in 2013. The part that caught my eye was the upper part of the graph, showing the breakdown of the trade with Russia as a horizontal stacked bar with custom labels. The value for each region / country
Often we need graphs that display two or more responses by the same category values. In many cases it is useful to plot both responses on the same response (Y) axis. This can be helpful to understand the data and compare the magnitudes side by side. This works when the scales
As Sheldon Cooper would say, this is the first episode of "Fun with Charts". I did not find a cool term like "Vexillology" and "Cartography" is taken by map making, so let us go with "Chartology". Yesterday, I saw a couple of interesting bar charts as shown on the right. I thought
This week I had the opportunity to present a 1/2 day seminar on creating clinical graphs using the SG procedures during an In-House SAS Users' group meeting. I have presented this seminar quite a few times now, and I always learn something. The audience was very receptive, with some people
A couple of days back, Rick Wicklin forwarded me a link to an article on the BadHessian Blog on creating a Bar Chart using six different freeware packages in R, Python and Julia. The target bar chart was one produced by the Jetpack stat module with WordPress. The graph is shown below. The unique feature of
Frequently you may want to modify the default colors, line patterns and symbols that are displayed on the graphics output produced by the Statistical Graphics, or SG procedures, and the Graph Template Language, GTL. Enhancements in SAS 9.4 have made that task much easier! In the examples below, we will look
The attention of the world is now on Sochi and the Winter Games. Gold, Silver and Bronze medals are being earned by these amazing athletes, and everyone has an eye on the tally. Andre sent me a link to TRinker's R Blog, showing a graph of the current tally. Andre
Users have often expressed the need for more marker symbols. ODS Graphics supports over 30 scalable marker symbols, both filled and empty. As mentioned in an earlier article, with SAS 9.4, filled markers can now have outlines and fills, and can also have special effects. Also with SAS 9.4, now you
In recent conversations with many SAS users at NESUG, SESUG and WUSS, a pattern emerges on the question of creating graphs with SAS or R. Many SAS users are aware of the new graph features in SAS that create high quality graphs with minimum fuss. But, many have not actually used
If you've ever tried to use PROC FREQ to create a frequency table of two character variables, you know that by default the categories for each variable are displayed in alphabetical order. A different order is sometimes more useful. For example, consider the following two-way table for the smoking status
How old is your version of SAS software? The graph on the left shows the release dates for various releases of SAS software, beginning with SAS 8.0. The graph is based on a graph on Jiangtang Hu's blog that shows the major SAS releases. As this graph demonstrates, SAS software
Last week, I presented some highlights of the new features for SG Procedures and GTL in SAS 9.4. Now, let us dig in a bit deeper. For a plot without a GROUP role, setting an attributes was always easy with SG procedures. All you need to do to set bar color
