Changing Bar Labels

By Kuai Kaui Wang · Published 4 November 2026
graphicsstata

Below is a worked example of changing bar chart labels in Stata:

Please note that it is sometimes more convenient to use value labels rather than graph label options to change graph bar labels. In my example it also allows the legend to be spread over the width of the graph.

The commands used are:

clear all

sysuse auto

label define origin 0 "Europe de l'Ouest" 1 "Asie de l'Est", modify

graph hbar mpg trunk turn, over(foreign) stack name(two,replace)
3 views 0 found this useful

Categorical Histograms

A histogram can be used to show either continuous or categorical data in a bar graph. For continuous data the histogram command in Stata will put the data into artificial categories called bins. For example, if you have a list of heights for 1000 people and you run the histogram command on that data, it will organize the heights into ranges. Each range is shown as a bar along the x-axis, and each bar represents the number of people whose height falls into that range. In this way the histogram command has created height categories to give a visual understanding of the distribution of heights in the data.

Read TechTip →

Violin Plot in Stata

A violin plot is a modified box-plot which adds the estimated kernel density to each plot. To draw this plot in Stata you will need a user-written command called vioplot. This can be easily installed within Stata using the following command:

Read TechTip →