With the powerful editing capabilities in Minitab, you can dramatically alter the look of your entire graph with just a few clicks of the mouse. But some of the most important edits that you can make are also the most specific. Often, you need to change only a single point on a graph, an individual group of observations, or a particular data label.
Edit a single data point that represents an important observation.
Change the look of an individual bar to highlight a target value.
Edit and display only those data labels that are important to your analysis.
Accent an important group of observations, and de-emphasize others.
In most cases, a simple double-click allows you to edit exactly what you want on a Minitab graph—no more, no less. But the kind of precise edits that are shown above require a different but equally simple technique.
Two types of graph items
All graph items that can be edited fall into one of two categories: stand-alone items and grouped items.
Stand-alone items
Most items (like axis labels, scales, and so on) are stand-alone items. To edit a stand-alone item, just double-click it. In the graph to the right, you can see that when you click a graph title, you’ve selected a single item.
Grouped items
But many items (like data display items and data labels) are part of a larger group. In the graph to the right, you can see that clicking a single bar on a histogram selects not just that one bar, but all of the bars on the graph.
Select first, and then edit
To edit a grouped item, you first select the item and then double-click to edit it. Each click of the mouse selects an increasingly specific set of items.
First click
Consider the points on this scatterplot. Click any one of them and all of the points are selected. You might stop here and double-click to make all of the points larger.
Second click
What if you want to edit all of the points in a particular group? Click the same point a second time, and now only the points of that group are selected. You might stop here and double-click any selected point to, say, change all of the red squares into yellow triangles.
Third click
Click the same point a third time and only the individual point is selected. You could then double-click the point to make it stand out from all the other points.
Putting it to use
Mastering this skill takes a very small time investment, especially when you compare it to the benefits in increased graph clarity and impact. Focus your edits on only those objects that you want to alter to ensure that the information in your graph is equally focused.
