How Many Clicks Does it Take?
Tactical Editing With Minitab Graphs
With the powerful editing capabilities in Minitab Release, 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 you'll make are also the most specific. Often, you'll want to change just a single point on a graph, an individual group of observations, or a particular data label.
 Edit a single data point representing 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 making the kind of precise edits shown above requires 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 ItemsMost (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. A graph title is a "stand-alone" item. |  |
Grouped ItemsBut 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 the bars on the graph. |  |
Select First, Then Edit
For graph items that are part of a group, 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 ClickConsider the points on this scatterplot. Click any one of them and all points are selected. You might stop here and double-click if you were interested in making all of the points larger. |  |
Second ClickWant 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 ClickClick 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 compared to the returns in increased graph clarity and impact. Focusing your editing on only those objects you want to alter ensures that the information conveyed by your graph is equally focused.