In this tutorial we'll look at how to construct a Bar Graph in SPSS. And here
we have the variable car color where we have 15 different cars that were
observed as people drove by someone noted the color of the car and what I've
done in this example is I've already entered my value labels.
So for example if I click on this button right up here then I'll see the colors
that the different numbers correspond to.
So notice we have one, two, three, four white cars were observed and so forth.
I'm going to turn these off for now but you'll see how they're very useful in
just a moment when we produce our Bar Graph. To produce a bar graph let's go to
Analyze and then Descriptive Statistics and we can actually use the Frequencies
command to produce a Bar Graph and then we can also use the Graphs I'll show you
both ways. So we'll start with this Analyze, Descriptive Statistics,
Frequencies and then here I'm going to - you should see your window look like
this -
I'm going to move car color over to the Variables box. Select Charts and then
here we want to select a Bar Charts. Click Continue.
Let's de-select the Display frequency tables and then click OK. And
notice here in this case we get a Bar Chart where the variable is car_color on
the X-axis the frequency is on the Y- axis we have our different car colors
here and and the height of the bar indicates the frequency or how many of
each color car was observed.
So we have two black cars were observed for white cars, six blue cars, two red cars,
and one green car.
Now many of the options on this chart can be modified and I'll show you one
quick modification we can make. If I double-click on this chart
what will happen is the Chart Editor will open as you see here and I'm going
to double click on any of these bars. And when I do that the Properties dialog box
opens.
Let's go ahead and go to Fill & Border. Click on that tab and then I'll select
this blue color right here and then click Apply and close this out.
Notice what happened here now my bars are blue. This is one of the many options
that can be modified in our charts.
Let's go ahead and close this out so click X and then now we have our chart
and notice the blue color has been applied. As I said at the beginning I was
going to show you how to obtain this exact same chart using the Graphs menu
command.
So let's go to Graphs. Go to Legacy Dialogs and then go to Bar. Now here a
Bar charts dialog box opens and I want to leave the Simple and Summaries for
groups of cases default options in place. So just click Define. And then here
what we want to do, you should see a window like this with car color on the
left,
go ahead and move that to the Category Axis box and then click OK. And you should see
that this gives us the exact same bar chart with the only exception is that I
haven't modified the color to be blue and I won't do that now
but you saw how to do that so I think you could do that as well. OK so we saw
how to obtain a bar chart using two different approaches. Both the
Frequencies procedure and using the Graphs Legacy Dialogs command.
This concludes the tutorial on obtaining a bar chart in SPSS.