n its third edition, Michael Mitchell’s A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics remains the essential introduction and reference for Stata graphics. The third edition retains all the features that made the first two editions so useful:

A complete guide to Stata’s graph command and Graph Editor
Exhaustive examples of customized graphs using both command options and the Graph Editor
Visual indexing of features—just look for a picture that matches what you want to do

New in this edition are treatments of contour plots, margins plots, and font handling. Mitchell dedicates a new subsection to contour plots, showing you how to control the number of levels, how to change the colors used, and how to produce effective legends. Over 30 graphs are used to demonstrate what you can accomplish with the new marginsplot command—graphs of estimated means and marginal means (with confidence intervals), interaction graphs, comparisons of groups, and more. Mitchell also adds a section that shows you how to get bold text, italic text, subscripts, superscripts, and Greek letters into your titles, axes, labels, and other text.

The book retains its visual style, presenting the reader with a color-coded, visual table of contents that runs along the right edge of every page and shows readers exactly where they are in the book. You can see the color-coded chapter tabs without opening the book, providing quick visual access to each chapter.

The heart of each chapter is a series of entries that are typically formatted three to a page. Each entry shows a graph command (with the emphasized portion of the command highlighted in red), the resulting graph, a description of what is being done, the dataset and scheme used, and a section showing how to produce the result by using the Graph Editor. Because every feature, option, and edit is demonstrated with a graph or screen capture, you can often flip through a section of the book to find exactly the effect you are seeking.

The first chapter details how to use the book, the types of Stata graphs, how to use schemes to control the overall appearance of graphs, and how to use options to make specific modifications. It also outlines a process for building graphs with the graph command.

The second chapter is a complete overview of the Graph Editor. It includes over 120 color graphics and screen captures to show exactly how things are done and how they look on the graph. With pictures and words, Mitchell shows how to change the color, size, or placement of any titles, markers, annotations, or other objects on your graph by using just a few mouse clicks. More subtly, he shows how to change things such as the number of ticks and labels on your axes, the number of columns in your legends, the label on an individual point, and more. He even shows how to convert, for example, a scatterplot to a line plot and how to rotate or pivot bar charts. Mitchell also covers advanced topics such as how to draw lines and arrows on graphs so that they continue to reference your objects of interest even if you resize the graph, combine it with other graphs, or change the scale or range of the axes. In short, he exposes all the Graph Editor’s tools, from the simplest to the most powerful. Mitchell does not stop there; almost every example in the book shows you how to accomplish the desired graph or effect not only by using a command or command-line option but also by using the Graph Editor.