Click here to see the SAS code.
Click here to see the example.
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This is my SAS imitation of Tableau Software's winning graph for 'Scenario 1'
of the 2005 DM Review magazine visualization contest (click here to see the article).
Click here to see gif image of Tableau Software's winning graph.
SAS doesn't generally do 'grouped line charts'.
Therefore, I took my grouped bar chart (to get the grouped axis layout),
and made the bars zero height, and annotated the lines.
A few improvements over the winning entry...
o I sort the departments by salary left/right = highest/lowest.
o I convert the values to millions, so there aren't so many zero's in the axis.
o I don't put so many tickmarks on my response axis (I felt that 12 major/labeled
tickmarks was excessive).
o I don't use tickmarks between each month abbreviation along the bottom axis.
(I use ' J A S O N D' rather than '|J|A|S|O|N|D|').
o I place the legend above the graph, so it doesn't waste white-space to the
right of the graph.
o I put dots on the lines at each data point, so you can 'see' which part of
the line is actual data, and which part is the interpolated line between
the data points.
o I add html charttips so that when you mouse over the dots, you can see
what the exact month, department, and data value was in the charttip.
o And, I use the abbreviated version of the department names, since everyone
in a company should recognize it's departments by their abbreviation (this
reduces the amount of text/ink on the page and makes it cleaner, and helps
fit the labels in a smaller space) - if you need to see the full-text
name, you can mouse-over and read the charttip :)
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