Graphics Styles - Overview

STATISTICA graphs consist of many components and literally thousands of different characteristics (e.g., line colors, patterns), settings, etc. Styles are collections of settings that you can apply to a particular graph or a specific aspect or part of a graph, e.g., the font of the top title. You can also configure the styles you create or modify as defaults that will be automatically applied to all new graphs that you will create. With STATISTICA, you can create, manage, and reuse styles pertaining to aspects of the graphs themselves, such as line patterns, hatch patterns, sizes and colors of arrows, etc.; these are called Graphics styles. In addition, you can create, manage, and reuse styles pertaining to the size and proportions of graphs; those are called Document Styles.

Graphics styles can be edited and created via the Graph Options dialog box; document styles can be edited via the Documents/Graphs: Settings tab of the Options dialog box. Note that when styles are applied to graphs, they modify the graphs themselves, and those modifications will be saved along with the respective graphs. Thus, if you, for example, e-mail to a colleague a graph customized by applying a particularly elaborate and customized graphics style, then that graph will appear on your colleague's computer customized in the same manner as you intended, even though on your colleague's installation of STATISTICA, the styles used to achieve the customization may not be defined.

Overview

Although most users may not need to use the advanced functionality and may not be interested in the internal working of STATISTICA, practically all features of STATISTICA graphs (thousands of combinations of settings) are internally represented by "styles." You can define these styles in a very simple way - by assigning custom names to their own selections of features in the respective graph customization dialog boxes. Later you can quickly re-use these styles by selecting them by name instead of repeating the tedious sequences of customizations. For example, a custom style of a specific arrow with a wide, filled head and a thick red tail can be called A red fat arrow and later selected with a single click of the mouse. Because that internal system of styles drives the management of practically all graph customizations, also all program defaults (i.e., the appearance of graphs when you do not make any customizations) are stored as styles and can be easily modified by the users.

In order to custom-tailor graphics options in STATISTICA and limit the need for repeating the same graph customization, the default settings of practically all features of STATISTICA graphs can be adjusted by the users. This flexible system customizability is possible because all features of the appearance of STATISTICA graphs are driven by the same, comprehensive system of styles.

A graphics style is a convenient way to combine sets of formatting and specification options into one collection. This feature allows you to specify and apply specific settings and formats for different components of a graph. Once you have created a graphics style, it can be applied to not only the current graph, but also to future graphs (of the same type).

There are several pre-defined, modifiable graphics styles to choose from, but the power and flexibility of creating entirely new graphic styles is at your fingertips. Graphic styles follow a hierarchical organization and higher-level styles consist of other (lower-level) styles. Therefore, styles can be created and applied on the component level (e.g. background color), or they can be used to encapsulate all of the component styles into a single graphic style that can be applied a graph as a whole.

Exchanging graphs that have styles applied to them

Once a style has been applied to a graph (either during creation of the graph or after the graph has been created), the graph features addressed by the style are determined by the style. The specifications of the resulting graph, however, are stored in the graph not only in terms of references to the respective styles, but also their absolute values: colors, sizes, patterns. This means that a graph with an applied style can be sent to another STATISTICA user, and its features will be correctly interpreted even though the user has not defined an equivalent graphics style.

Saving styles

Graphics styles (along with complete sets of globally defined graph options) can be saved, exported, or imported through the Configurations tab, available by selecting Options from the Tools tab or menu. Styles can also be imported or exported using a simple shortcut method, specifically the method of Using a graph as a carrier of a graphics style from one system to another (see Importing and Exporting Styles).