General Categories of Graphs

In addition to the specialized statistical graphs that are available from the output dialogs in all statistical procedures, there are two general categories or classes of graphs both accessible from the Graphs menu, Graphs toolbar, shortcut menus, and the STATISTICA Start button menu:

The most important difference between these two general categories lies in the data that the graph types utilize for generating plots:

Input data graphs. Graphs of Input Data and their expanded version in the Graphs menu produce statistical summaries or other representations of the raw data in the current input data spreadsheet (typically for the entire variable(s) or its subsets if case selection conditions are used). Note that if graphs of this general category are produced using a shortcut menu from within a spreadsheet of results that does not contain the actual data (e.g., a correlation matrix), STATISTICA will still reach to the respective input (raw) data in order to produce the graph (e.g., a scatterplot of the variables identified by the selected cell in the correlation matrix from which the shortcut menu was opened).

Graphs of Block Data. Graphs of Block Data, on the other hand, are entirely independent of the concept of "input data" or "datafile." They provide a general tool to visualize numeric values in the currently highlighted block of any spreadsheet (which can contain values from custom defined subsets of numerical output or arbitrarily selected subsets of raw data).

Common features of the two categories of graphs. Note that these two general categories of graphs offer the same customization options and the same selection of types of graphs. For example, you can create the same, highly specialized categorized ternary graph from the input (raw) dataset, and from a custom defined block of values representing results of a particular test.