Adding elements to graphs as a slideshow

| Gabriel |

One of the tricks to a successful presentation is to limit what your audience sees so they don’t get ahead of you and also to preserve a general sense of timing and flow. This helps keep the audience’s attention and also is good for focusing expectations in such a way that the next bit is counter-intuitive and therefore interesting. Nothing is so boring as sitting in a talk and seeing ten bullet points and realizing that the speaker is only on bullet number three.

Similarly if you’re using graphs in a talk (which you should as much as possible since they read better than tables), you may only want to reveal part of a graph as you talk about it, then reveal the next bit when you’re ready. The most obvious way to do this is to just crop the graph or cover it with boxes that match the background or something. Unfortunately that’s ugly and clunky and doesn’t work if the graph elements are tightly commingled. Another way to do it is to generate two graphs, one of which has the elements and the other of which doesn’t. The problem with this is that the graphs don’t match up properly. For instance, if you have a line graph and you keep adding lines to it, the legend will first appear and then grow larger, crowding out the graph itself.

Ideally, what you want is a set of graphs that are completely identical except some elements are missing in one version which are added in the other version. You can then line the graphs up, talk about the first set of elements, and then do a smooth transition to the version with the full set of elements. Here’s an example from the talk I gave yesterday. In order to explain crossover I first show the song’s native formats then dissolve to also show the crossover formats.

Here’s how I did it. The basic trick is that Stata can create transparent graph elements by setting the color to “none”. You do the exact same graph multiple times, you just set colors to be transparent when you want to conceal elements. That is, the code in lines 10–14 is identical to that in lines 17–21 except that lines 13 and 14 set line color to “none” instead of Stata’s standard s2color scheme.

use final_f, clear
keep if artist=="SARA BAREILLES"
drop if format=="All" | format=="Other"
sum date
local maxdate=`r(max)'
local mindate=`r(min)'
local interval=(`maxdate'-`mindate')/10
local interval=round(`interval',7)

twoway (line Nt_inc_p date if format=="AAA_Rock", lwidth(thick) lcolor(navy)) /*
  */ (line Nt_inc_p date if format=="Hot_AC", lwidth(thick) lcolor(maroon)) /*
  */ (line Nt_inc_p date if format=="Top_40", lwidth(thick) lcolor(none)) /*
  */ (line Nt_inc_p date if format=="Mainstream_AC", lwidth(thick) lcolor(none)) /*
  */ , xtitle("") xmtick(`mindate'(7)`maxdate') xlabel(`mindate'(`interval')`maxdate', labsize(vsmall) angle(forty_five) format(%tdMon_dd,_CCYY)) legend(order (1 "AAA Rock" 2 "Hot AC" 3 "Top 40" 4 "Mainstream AC"))  graphregion(fcolor(white))
graph export $images/sarabareilles_lovesong_1.pdf, replace

twoway (line Nt_inc_p date if format=="AAA_Rock", lwidth(thick) lcolor(navy)) /*
  */ (line Nt_inc_p date if format=="Hot_AC", lwidth(thick) lcolor(maroon)) /*
  */ (line Nt_inc_p date if format=="Top_40", lwidth(thick) lcolor(dkorange)) /*
  */ (line Nt_inc_p date if format=="Mainstream_AC", lwidth(thick) lcolor(forest_green)) /*
*/ , xtitle("") xmtick(`mindate'(7)`maxdate') xlabel(`mindate'(`interval')`maxdate', labsize(vsmall) angle(forty_five) format(%tdMon_dd,_CCYY)) legend(order (1 "AAA Rock" 2 "Hot AC" 3 "Top 40" 4 "Mainstream AC")) graphregion(fcolor(white))
graph export $images/sarabareilles_lovesong_2.pdf, replace 

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