I broadly agree with Maarten.
Contrary to your inclination, the easiest way to do what you want is to
plot a new variable that is just the old one divided by 1000. You may
well want to modify the variable label or indicate different units
through an axis title. You can and should keep the existing variable
exactly as is for other purposes.
A more general tool for using graph scales other than the raw data is
-mylabels- from SSC. It offers another solution equivalent to (and
indeed apparently more general than) what I gather you can do in MS
Excel.
A written discussion of similar issues is at
SJ-8-1 gr0032 . . . . . . . Stata tip 59: Plotting on any transformed
scale
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . N.
J. Cox
Q1/08 SJ 8(1):142--145 (no
commands)
tip on how to graph data on a transformed scale
Nick
[email protected]
Maarten buis
--- Gisella Young <[email protected]> wrote:
> It occurs to me that a (hopefully) simpler way might just be to title
> the y-axis "Whatever (thousands)" or "Whatever ('000)" and then have
> the labels all divided by a thousand, so what would have been 1000000
> would just be 1000, in which case the absence of spaces doesn't
> really matter as the smaller number of 0's is easy to see. However
> I'm not sure if there is an easy way of doing this (in my pre-Stata
> life I made a lot of graphs in Excel and there is an option to tick
> to show the graph scale in 100's, 1000's, etc). I don't want to
> actually divide my y variable by 1000 as i still want the original
> variable to be used in plotting the chart, but just want to show the
> variable graphically in '000's - is there a way to do this in Stata?
This is exactly what I would do. If you think carefully about it, an
option that removes three zeros from the y-axis labels does exactly the
same thing as dividing your y by 1000 and use that variable for the
plot.
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