Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Make sure you have a title and each column of data has a title.
If you are entering data by hand, use time or the independent variable in the first column and
your observations or measurements in the next column. Be sure to include a label in the top cell
of each column.
For Hobo datalogger data, you only need three columns: Date/Time Temperature (*C) and
"Intensity". This example uses just the Date/time for the X axis (independent variable) and
temperature for the Y axis (dependent variable).
You may wish to use the use the "Temp data for graphing exercise" Excel file included with
these instructions. If you wish to use your own data, just set up your spreadsheet with the
appropriate columns and you can follow the steps below.
Click on the "air temperature" label at the top of the data column.
Hold down ctrl + shift and press the down arrow key on the
keyboard. The column of data will be selected.
You can also select the data by clicking on the top cell of the
column and holding down the left mouse button while scrolling
down to the end of the column.
In the future, if you need to select data from columns that are not
next to each other, highlight the first column, then hold down the
Ctrl key and highlight the other column you need.
Excel automatically makes a graph, but we have to move it and adjust it to our needs
Click on "New sheet" in the dialogue box and enter a name for the new chart in the space.
To define the X axis labels, right-click in the chart area and choose "select data." The dialogue
box will appear.
Click on the "edit" button for the horizontal Axis labels.
Click on the small square chart icon to the right of the space to choose the axis labels
Now let's fix the Y axis scale and the title. The Y axis shows too much blank space at the bottom of
the scale.
Right click on the Y axis to get to the list that
includes "format axis" and click on it. In the "Axis
options" dialogue box, choose the "fixed" option for
minimum and maximum. Choose a minimum value
of 15 and a maximum value of 29.
Click on the title and enter text to clarify what the graph is showing.
You can click on the text in the box to enter a label, and
drag the box to the location you choose.
Try out some of the other options in the menu bars. You can change the labels, color and style
of the line, and add gridlines. Try adding the water temperature data from
the
spreadsheet by right clicking in the chart area and using the dialogue box.
You can always click on the question mark in the upper right and type a question or topic
in the help box.
Please contact Pat Harcourt if you have questions, corrections, or suggestions for this exercise.
pharcour@usc.edu 213 740-4693 or 508 215-9641.