Using # column (or any other column) for an individual point label

[tom lawtonParticipant]

Hi-

I’d like to label occasional outlying points on a plot, not with their X and Y values, but with the contents of a different column- either the # column, or another column which I can use to uniquely identify the row responsible for the outlier.

I can attach the line number if I choose to label all points with the line number, but I don’t see a way to tokenise it to use when a label is snapped to a single point… In the attached example, I’d like “Here” to be “123”- the line number of that data point…

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Tom

[dgteamModerator]

This is an interesting use case! We have been thinking about this, as the Label command does not have a way to do this automatically, but we can see the benefit.

One thing to make sure you know that at any time you can turn on the Hover (shift-command-H) and you have a pop-up box that gives you information on the point.  You can also customize the information you see in the box, using the Points command, to show other information.

Another thing that might help make this easier is to control-click (right click) on a point and “Select Point in Table”.  This will highlight the row that corresponds to a point and you could then type the row number into the Label command. If you are only doing this for a few points, this might be the easiest way.

Another approach I like to use is to set up a column in the data table where you flag the points you want to label and use a mask.

Here is one example where the column called Label, is used in a mask in a Connect command, which can draw arrows similar to the Label command.

Here row 2 and 3 have the Label column set to ‘1’.

Here is the command and graph where the label is set to the row number along with a prefix.

The process would be to:

1. right click points you want to label
2. add a ‘1’ to the label column for that row.
3. populate the xx and yy locations depending on the direction you want to arrow

Anyway, hope this helps.  We will be thinking about how the Label command could be more flexible to provide other information on a point.

[tom lawtonParticipant]

Yes, I’d found the hover, and that’s very handy interactively.

Ahhh! Crafty idea, to add a column to mask for labelling- I may use that as a workaround for now.

Hopefully you’ll be able to add a feature where you can use the value from any column as the content of a label for individual points 😉

Pushing this a little further still (and slightly different)- I’d also like to be able to use a specified graphic as the content of the label…. (The use case being, for instance, an inset graph showing the timeseries which gave rise to a particular plotted datapoint). Obviously I could do this somewhat statically on a composition graph- but I like the way labels work..!!

Thanks for the mask suggestion,

Tom

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