I work with numerous packages, and eventually manage to get
what I want. However, the addition of what seems like a trivial
feature to Stata would make my life much easier.
For example, in
Hospital improvement in time to reperfusion in patients with acute
myocardial infarction, 1999 to 2002. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2006 Jan
3;47(1):45-51. McNamara RL, Herrin J, et al
You will see a "stippled" histogram that I produced in Excel. My
coauthor is a clinician who felt this figure was the clearest way to
communicate to other clinicians; the journal editors denied us
the option of grey shading, requiring black & white figures only.
Thus, each time I revised and reran the analysis, which was often,
I had to export the data to excel to recreate this figure manually.
There are tricks to speed this up, but it is still labor intensive
and error prone.
