Yesterday I posted about creating bar charts with TikZ and pgfplots.

Today I want to present a command to make the bars of one data series (i.e., one of my systems) appear one after the other on a beamer LaTeX slide.

This is the code to put into your preamble:

\newcounter{MyNextSlide}
\newcounter{MyNextNextSlide}
\newcommand{\addplotoverlay}[5][]{
\setcounter{MyNextSlide}{#5}
\stepcounter{MyNextSlide}
\setcounter{MyNextNextSlide}{\theMyNextSlide}
\stepcounter{MyNextNextSlide}
\alt<#5->{\only<#5->{\alt<\theMyNextSlide->{\alt<\theMyNextNextSlide->{
\addplot+ [ybar,#1] coordinates {#2 #3 #4}; 
}{
\addplot+ [ybar,#1] coordinates {#2 #3}; 
}}{
\addplot+ [ybar,#1] coordinates {#2}; 
}}}{
\addplot+ [ybar,#1] coordinates {(PI,0)}; % + don't show zero values in plot
}
}

Usage (‘first slide’ refers to the slide on which value 1 should first appear, it will stay and the slide afterwards will add value 2, the slide after that will add value 3):

\addplotoverlay [color or other options] {value 1}{value 2}{value 3}{first slide}

This depends on there being three data points in a data series and I have hardcoded the x coordinate PI. You’ll probably need to adjust this before you are able to do something useful with this code.