Customizing categorical variables

Your Categorical variables will have a set of possible values. Sometimes, these values are just what you want on your graph and reports.

For example if they contain the values "Left" and "Right". These are meaningful.

Other times, the meaning is encoded in some way. For example, the values might just be "1", "2" and "3", or "L" and "R". Or the order might not be what you want to see.

You have various options for customizing the appearance of each value, and their ordering.

Labelling values

You can label each value with a meaningful label, by opening the Values dialog for the column:

Then you will see the Values dialog, and you can enter labels for each value. You can also assign a color or even a DataMoji for each value here too:

See here to learn about how to use DataMojis.

Coloring categorical variables

Once you have set a color for each value, this color will be used on graphs where it is useful, instead of the defaults:

• Coloring data points if you have a categorical X or Z variable
• Coloring regression lines

See also coloring by a categorical Z variable.

Ordering categorical variables

You will also have noticed the Order buttons. This allows you to set the order of the values, which otherwise are ordered in the order which they appear in the dataset. For example, if the above dataset had started with a Second Period data sample, then the labels on the graph would have been the other way around. Ordering lets you fix this kind of thing.

Using a DataMoji

There is even a button to allow you to display a particular DataMoji for each value. Have fun!

Excluding categorical variables

The Exclude buttons allow you to exclude rows in the dataset that have a particular categorical value. These will then be prevented from showing on a graph or being used in a statistical test. This can be undone by unchecking the Exclude button.

See here for more about excluding rows.

Overview of graphing categorical variables