Components of a Graph

In general, a graph is made of up of the following parts:

titles and footnotes
one or more cells that contain a composite of one or more plots
legends, which can reside inside or outside a cell

The following figure shows the different parts of a graph:

1Graph

a visualization created by SAS/GRAPH software. The graph can contain titles, footnotes, legends, and one or more cells that have one or more plots.

2Cell

a distinct rectangular subregion of a graph that can contain plots, text, and legends.

3Title

descriptive text that is displayed above any cell or plot areas in the graph.

4Plot

a visual representation of data such as a scatter plot, a series line, a bar chart, or a histogram. Multiple plots can be overlaid in a cell to create a graph.

5Legend

refers collectively to the legend border, one or more legend entries (where each entry has a symbol and a corresponding label) and an optional legend title.

6Axis

refers collectively to the axis line, the major and minor tick marks, the major tick mark values, and the axis label. Each cell has a set of axes that are shared by all the plots in the cell. In multi‐cell graphs, the columns and rows of cells can share common axes if the cells have the same data type.

7Footnote

descriptive text that is displayed below any cell or plot areas in the graph.