In the strictest sense, APA style discourages the use of color in graphics, stipulating that it be used only when it is "absolutely necessary". Consequently, most universities and dissertation committees also discourage (or downright forbid) the use of color graphics in dissertation manuscripts. Personally, i find this irritating, as I think most graphical representations of data can be made more clear with the appropriate use of color. However, I suppose the guideline is meant to provide uniformity and consistency across manuscripts, which is understandable.
Unfortunately, if you use SPSS you've probably already discovered that it produces graphics in color by default. Not to worry, your graphs can be changed easily. Better yet, you can make simple adjustments to your SPSS settings that will force the program to create APA-compliant (i.e. black & white) graphics in all output! Here is how you do it...
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