Charts for comparing results between many categories

Charts are useful tools for comparing a statistic between groups defined by a categorical variable with many different categories. It has turned out from a number of postings on Statalist that Stata’s standard implementation of these graphs with graph dot and graph bar often limits the the users in their ambition to design such graphs. In most cases, however, users’ design wishes can be satisfied by reverting to the low-level command graph twoway. This tutorial talk demonstrates the construction of charts with graph twoway. We will start by reconstructing a simple bar chart with graph twoway and then move to a number of extensions that are possible when using graph twoway. I will illustrate some trickery with stored results and local macros, as well as a number of useful user-written programs.