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Brief Tutorial on Using Excel to Draw an X-Y Plot
The following tutorial is based on using Windows Office 2003. Earlier versions work similarly, but you may find the placement of controls on the menu to be slightly different.
- Open Excel
- For our tutorial, we will plot the data:
(5,25), (6, 36), (7,49), (8,64), (9,81), (10,100)
For the first entry (5, 25), enter x-coordinate in column A, row 1 and enter the y-coordinate in B1. Repeat for the other five points. You Excel window should look like this:
- Use your cursor to highly the columns and rows of data you want to plot (and nothing else). If you have highlighted them properly, they should look like:
- Drag down the Chart Wizard. If you have chart wizard icon on your menu bar, as shown below, just click on it. Otherwise, drag down Insert until you get to Chart… and release.
5, This will pop a window that look like this. Typically, you will want to choose XY(Scatter) [ and not Line , even though it looks similar – this is the most common error people make ]
- To change the range and format of the x-axis, double-click on any number along the axis. It pops up a menu with various tabs. The one here allows you to change the font format.
The most important one is called Scale. This allows you to choose the range of the x-axis (minimum and maximum values) and the steps between major and minor tick marks. Choose the range to lie between 5 and 10. Then click ok. After you complete this for the x-axis, repeat for the y-axis (click on any number on the y-axis) and choose a narrow range.
- After you click OK again, you have an Excel Chart that looks like this:
- To put the finish touches on the plot (the graph and axes label), click on the chart (the graph itself) and a menu item called Chart should appear. Drag it down and choose Chart Options. It is self-explanatory.
a. Click on Box C b. Type: =A1^ This tells Excel to take the number in box A1 and cube it. Hit Enter and see the result
We could repeat this C2, C3, etc., but we would be repeating the same operation over and over. Imagine if there were 1000 numbers in Column A1 !?
c. Instead, use your cursor to highlight C1 thru C6 (where you want the cubes to be placed).
d. Drag down the Edit menu to Fill , then to Down on the submenu (and then release). This instructs Excel to take the same rule you applied to A and C1 and apply it successively to (A2, C2), then (A3,C3), etc., as far as you highlighted:
- Now we want to graph Column A vs. Column C. a. Highlight all THREE columns b. Choose the Chart wizard as in Step 4. Just hit Next until it finishes and places the plot on the Sheet. Notice that it plots both the squares and the cubes
Under Name, but the Name you want to call the first curve (Squares).
Click Ok. The window disappears and now the first curve in the legend has the label you chose. Now repeat the process choosing Series2 and giving it the name you want (Cubes). The result is:
