@ballardw is correct -- the DISCRETEORDER option will not work with VBARBASIC/HBARBASIC.   As a general principle, the VBAR statement should be favored over the VBARBASIC statement, except for two notable situations: You want to overlay a plot on top of the bar chart that is not allowed by the VBAR statement. If you compute the statistics outside of SGPLOT, you would normally use a VBARPARM statement for this situation. However, if the statistics are simple (freq, sum , and mean), VBARBASIC is a good statement to use instead of having to do a separate compute step. You want to overlay a non-grouped line chart on a grouped bar chart. For this situation, you would normally compute the statistics outside of SGPLOT and use a SERIES and a VBARPARM. However, using VBABASIC might save you one compute step. Hope this helps! ... View more

The inline style escapement is not supported in ODS graphics. The only inline escapement supported is unicode (in all text) and sup/sub (in the INSET statement and TEXT annotation). The rich text support you describe can be done using the standard TITLE/FOOTNOTE syntax you showed, as well as the TEXT/TEXTCONT functions in the annotation facility. ... View more

By default, the missing color is special, and it is retrieved from the active ODS style. However, if you use an attributes map instead of STYLEATTRS, you can control all of the colors, including "missing". ... View more

Something like this should work for you: proc sgplot data=class; styleattrs DATACOLORS=(Black Gray); vbarbasic age / nooutline group = sex groupdisplay=cluster response=Weight stat=mean ; block x=age block=age2 / novalues fillattrs=(color=white) altfillattrs=(color=cxAAAAAA) transparency=0.9 filltype=alternate; run; ... View more

@grsanford , I have a better workaround than using the VALUES option. The box plots support the CAPSHAPE option. Just set CAPSHAPE=NONE, and you should get the result you need.  ... View more