SPSS For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Some Types of Graphs

In This Chapter

• Drawing line charts with single and multiple lines

• Generating scatterplots

• Creating bar charts from your data

This chapter provides examples of various graphical data displays and shows you how to build the graphs you're probably most familiar with; Chapter 11 shows examples of graph types that may be less familiar to you. Both chapters present each example as a step-by-step procedure, kept as simple as possible.

Although every variation of every possible chart won't fit into a pair of chapters, you can certainly use the procedures they present to produce some nifty-looking graphs. And once you get the basic idea of producing graphs, you should have no problem branching out and making fancy graphs of your own.

You could work through the examples in these two chapters to get an overview of building the kinds of graphs you can get from SPSS — not a bad idea for a beginner — or simply choose the look you want your data to have and follow the steps given here to construct the chart that does the job. Either way, when you get a handle on the basics, you can step through the process again and again, using your data, trying variations until you get charts that appear the way you want them to.

Line Chart

A line chart works well as a visual summary of categorical values. Line charts are also useful for displaying timelines because they demonstrate up and down trends so well. Line graphs are popular because they're easy to read. If they're not the ...