Internal:Analytica Graph Settings

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Analytica 4.0 substantially extends the graphing and charting options of earlier releases, with a wide range of new options.

Richer Plots Types

Using the options below, you can create a much wider variety of chart styles, including:

Bar Chart variations
Scatter plot variations
Line plot variations
  • Standard (continuous) line plots
  • XY parametric plots
  • Log Plots (axis log scaling)
  • Sideways plots

Graph Appearance

New options let you control many aspects of the appearance of a graph, including:

  • Control of background fill -- solid color, gradient color, or hatch.
  • Font for axis titles, labels, and key, including color, face, size, and style.
  • Location of Key.
  • Grid and tick styles
  • Axis label rotations
  • Three-D effects (solid bars, ribbons)
  • Filled line graphs, with control of transparency

Graph Setting Associations

Graph settings are now have an association with the displayed value (pivot options for multidimensional arrays) and the uncertainty view (Mid, Confidence Bands, PDF, CDF, and Sample). This means the graph view changes intelligently as you change the uncertainty view or pivot options. For example, you can display a probability distribution as a probability mass histogram as a bar graph, confidence bands as lines, and sample as a scatter plot, without having to readjust the settings each time you change the uncertainty view. Axis range settings are associated the index, even when the x and y axes are flipped, or are otherwise changed by pivoting.

In most cases, you don't need to worry much about these associations -- they enable Analytica to select graph styles and axis ranges more intelligently, with less effort by you. For example, if you select "Set Default" after changing axis range settings, they will be saved as the default for that index, so that they will apply to all graphs of arrays using that index.

Graphing Dimensions and Roles

A general and flexible system of graphing dimensions and graphing roles allows a very rich space of chart types to be created using only a few elementary building blocks. The mechanism also allows many dimensions to be reflected on a single graph.

A computed value or an index can serve as a graphing dimension. Graphing dimensions are then assigned to graphing roles, and the user can easily pivot the graphing roles to alter the assignment of dimensions to roles. By assigning graphing dimensions to roles, a user can view many dimensions at once, and compare multiple values on the same graph.

Selectable graphing roles include X-axis, Y-axis, combined Color/Symbol Key, and Bar Origin, and may soon include Symbol Size and separate Color and Symbol Keys.

While Analytica 3.x allowed a single external X-value to be plotted against a result, the new system allows any number of external variables to be included and compared in the same graph.

Selecting Data for Graphing

The structure of data used to create a plot is now much more flexible. A Coordinate Index can be used to plot data that is organized in columns, without having to break the data into multiple variables. Multiple external variables can be merge into the plot as graphing dimensions. In a Scatter Plot, you can pivot both X and Y axes to explore multi-dimensional data from many "angles".

Categorical and Continuous Plots

Analytica 4.0 is smarter about distinguishing between categorical (or discrete) data, usually using displayed with a bar graph, and continuous data, usually using a line graph. Usually, Analytica can tell from the data which it is: If it contains text values, it is discrete. If it contains numbers it is continuous.

Sometimes, you want to treat the numbers as discrete -- for example, a Binomial or Poisson distribution. Usually, Analytica will do that. But, if it can't tell, you can control how a variable displays by

  • Checking the Categorical box in the Axis range tab of the Graph settings dialog, or
  • by specifying its Domain attribute as Continuous to make it continuous, or any thing else to make it categorical.

Analytica maintains separate line-style settings for categorical and continuous plots. (The running axis of a plot, usually x-axis, determines whether the plot is continuous or categorical). Thus, by pivoting a continuous dimension to the x-axis to replace what was a categorical dimension, a graph may change from a bar graph to line graph, for example.

Graph Style Templates

Graph style templates provide a way to encapsulate a collection of graph settings in a named template, when can then be selected. Libraries of graph templates can be distributed, and users can create their own custom graph templates.

Graph styles and options

History

Introduced in Analytica 4.0.

See Also