Overlaying/combining bar and line graphs with two bar categories

[Sebastian Geiger]

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to create a combined line and bar graph with two categories for my bar chart. I have monthly data for the line chart, but only annual data for the bar charts (I filled all months of the respective year with the same value). Hence, I typed:

graph twoway (bar inflow outflow time) (line leiharb time, lc(black)) if jahr>=1998

The result is:



As you can see, the first problem is that the second category (here: outflow) completely covers the first category (here: inflow). Thus, I have tried to circumvent this problem by replacing the first six months of "inflow" and the last six month of "outflow" with missing:

* MANIPULATE VARIABLE FOR GRAPH
replace inflow = . if monat>=7
replace outflow = . if monat<=6

* GRAPH
graph twoway (bar inflow outflow time) (line leiharb time, lc(black)) if jahr>=1998

Now, the result is:



Although, it looks better now, the problem is that there are small with lines between the bar since one blue/red bar is actually comprised of 6 smaller (identical but separate) bars. I tried to simply disable the lines of the smaller bars by experimenting with the "lintensity(0)" option. However, Stata is telling me that this option is not allowed (probably because I am combining two graphs). Thus, this command does not work:

graph twoway (bar inflow outflow time, lintensity(0)) (line leiharb time, lc(black)) if jahr>=1998
option lintensity() not allowed

Does anyone have an idea how I can create such a combined graph which does not suffer from the shortcomings of my current graph.

Thank you in advance!

Best regards,
Sebastian

[Cyrus Levy]

When I enlarge the second figure, what I see is that the fill color and line color of the bars are not the same. You can try something like this:

graph twoway (bar inflow time, lcolor(blue) fcolor(blue)) (bar outflow time, lcolor(red) fcolor(red)) ......


help barlook_options
help colorstyle

[Sebastian Geiger]

Thank you Cyrus for your answer. I tried your code:

graph twoway (bar inflow time, fcolor(blue) lcolor(blue)) (bar outflow time, lcolor(red) fcolor(red)) (line leiharb time, lc(black)) if jahr>=1998

The result is this:


Even though, the border between the small bars becomes less apparent, it looks like that there is still a different color between the bars (to me it looks a little darker).

After experimenting with various options, I finally found a way to solve the problem. If someone is interested in the solution: One needs to tell Stata that the fill intensity should be 100. After doing that the bars (including their borders) have the same color.

graph twoway (bar inflow time, fintensity(inten100) ) (bar outflow time, fintensity(inten100) ) (line leiharb time, lc(black)) if jahr>=1998

Cyrus, thank you again for inspiring me to experiment with the "look of bar" options a little more.

[David Tsu]

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