How to Create a Bar Chart in SPSS - Bar Graph - YouTube

In this tutorial we'll look at how to construct a Bar Graph in SPSS. And here

we have the variable car color where we have 15 different cars that were

observed as people drove by someone noted the color of the car and what I've

done in this example is I've already entered my value labels.

So for example if I click on this button right up here then I'll see the colors

that the different numbers correspond to.

So notice we have one, two, three, four white cars were observed and so forth.

I'm going to turn these off for now but you'll see how they're very useful in

just a moment when we produce our Bar Graph. To produce a bar graph let's go to

Analyze and then Descriptive Statistics and we can actually use the Frequencies

command to produce a Bar Graph and then we can also use the Graphs I'll show you

both ways. So we'll start with this Analyze, Descriptive Statistics,

Frequencies and then here I'm going to - you should see your window look like

this -

I'm going to move car color over to the Variables box. Select Charts and then

here we want to select a Bar Charts. Click Continue.

Let's de-select the Display frequency tables and then click OK. And

notice here in this case we get a Bar Chart where the variable is car_color on

the X-axis the frequency is on the Y- axis we have our different car colors

here and and the height of the bar indicates the frequency or how many of

each color car was observed.

So we have two black cars were observed for white cars, six blue cars, two red cars,

and one green car.

Now many of the options on this chart can be modified and I'll show you one

quick modification we can make. If I double-click on this chart

what will happen is the Chart Editor will open as you see here and I'm going

to double click on any of these bars. And when I do that the Properties dialog box

opens.

Let's go ahead and go to Fill & Border. Click on that tab and then I'll select

this blue color right here and then click Apply and close this out.

Notice what happened here now my bars are blue. This is one of the many options

that can be modified in our charts.

Let's go ahead and close this out so click X and then now we have our chart

and notice the blue color has been applied. As I said at the beginning I was

going to show you how to obtain this exact same chart using the Graphs menu

command.

So let's go to Graphs. Go to Legacy Dialogs and then go to Bar. Now here a

Bar charts dialog box opens and I want to leave the Simple and Summaries for

groups of cases default options in place. So just click Define. And then here

what we want to do, you should see a window like this with car color on the

left,

go ahead and move that to the Category Axis box and then click OK. And you should see

that this gives us the exact same bar chart with the only exception is that I

haven't modified the color to be blue and I won't do that now

but you saw how to do that so I think you could do that as well. OK so we saw

how to obtain a bar chart using two different approaches. Both the

Frequencies procedure and using the Graphs Legacy Dialogs command.

This concludes the tutorial on obtaining a bar chart in SPSS.