Page Properties

Double-clicking the "1" button in the upper left corner of the graph page opens the Layer Control dialog. You already had first contact with it in tutorial 1 when you added the data to the empty graph template (see Figure 3-3, tutorial 1).

Now, we take a closer look at the dialog. Its left part is organized like a tree. Its branches can be expanded and collapsed by clicking on the "+" or "-" symbol.

The root of the tree (which is highlighted in Figure 3-1) is labeled "MyFirstPlot" - which is the name of the graph. It branches to "MyFirstPlot:1" which denotes the first layer of the graph. This structure will become clearer in tutorial 3. The items covered by "MyFirstPlot:1" are "Frame", "Grids", "Legends", "Axes" and "Datasets".

The right part shows the dialog itself. It contains the settings that can be made in the context of the item selected from the tree.

As for "MyFirstPlot", the settings determine the layout of the graph page, like page size, orientation etc. Just to try something, click the dropdown arrow right of the "Background" list box. Choose one of the colors from the palette and click the "Apply" button. The background color of the plot window immediately changes to the color of your choice.

For the following steps, please set the background color back to white (default).

Click on the "Show guiding grid" checkbox so that it shows a checkmark, then click apply. Now, the background of the graph shows a grid which can be used as a guide when moving and resizing a graph (see Figure 3-2).