st: New program on SSC - multibar.ado

[Fred Wolfe <fwolfe@arthritis-research.org>]

Last week during a discussion of bar and dot graphs I complained that 
Stata graphs did handle overlapping bar and dot graphs well (i.e, 
didn't do what I wanted them to do).

Nick Cox responded, in part, by suggesting that what I wanted might 
involve a results set. That started me thinking and I ended up 
writing a wrapper to -graph bar- and graph dot- that accomplishes the 
task, though I still think this sort of thing might properly belong 
in official Stata.

In Stata's -graph bar,over(x)- x has to be a non-overlapping 
categorical variable. Consider that x represents a categorical 
variable for treatments A, B, and C that persons might use. But what 
if persons use A and B.

If we were to use this command, -graph bar A B C-, it would work with 
overlapping groups.  if we wanted:

-graph bar first last,over(x)- it would not work because there is no 
way to represent overlaps using x.

on SSC thanks to Kit Baum(ssc install multibar) the program 
-multibar- creates a result set that allows overlapping group 
representation. The attached .dta file will run the example shown in 
the help file.

I hope this program will be of use. It should run in Stata 9 and 10.

Fred







Fred Wolfe
National Data Bank for Rheumatic Diseases
Wichita, Kansas
Tel +1 316 263 2125
fwolfe@arthritis-research.org

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