HOW TO FORMAT AN EXCEL GRAPH PART 1: SCALING THE AXES

Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering The Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332

Summary This is the first of two documents that review the steps that a beginner should take to format a plot prepared in Excel. This document concentrates on scaling the axes for the data display. The second document concentrates on the visual format of the data sets. The following specific formatting steps are explained here: 1) How to open the Excel Chart toolbar; 2) How to adjust the scale of the Y-axis to tightly frame the data; 3) How to adjust the scale of the X-axis to tightly frame the data.

How to Format an Excel Graph--I Scaling the Axes Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Experimental results are often represented graphically, and your graphs must package information clearly, simply and specifically. You achieve these goals by formatting your graphs or plots. Plotting tools, such as those in Excel and in Matlab, can give you great control over your information display, but they do not do all the work for you. After you generate a plot in Excel, you must adjust that plots formatting in order to produce a good display. This document shows you the basic steps for adjusting an Excel plots format, and it outlines the principles you should follow in making your format adjustments. We will show you how to adjust the plot shown below. Your experimental project results might be displayed in an Excel graph that looks like this:

This is a perfectly acceptable display. It is rich with information, and it provides no distractions from that information. Every line and axis has a specific label, with units easily visible. On the plot, paired/related data sets are visually related by the weight and patterns of the lines. Non-data information has been eliminated when possible.

How to Format an Excel Graph--I Scaling the Axes Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Your goal is to produce the clear and simple plot that was shown above. However, when you plot your data using Excels default settings, your data yields this display:

In order to obtain an the desired display, you need re-format this chart by hand. This is the first of two documents that explain how to adjust your Excel plots for presentation; this document walks you through the process of scaling the axes; the next document shows you how to adjust the legends appearance and placement and how to format the data markers and model lines appropriately.

How to Format an Excel Graph--I Scaling the Axes Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

General: Scale the Axes to Frame the Data The first task in plot formatting is to adjust the X- and Y-axes. In general, your data should dominate the plot, so you should adjust the axis scales to eliminate blank space on the sides, top and bottom of the plot. HOWEVER: When you adjust the axis scales, you will probably introduce distorting offsets from the origin location on the plot; it is your job to determine whether these distortions are trivial or significant. You must always be able to characterize and explain such distortions, and your specific decisions about axis scales should take the problem of distortion into account. In this example, we assume that the problem of distortion is trivial, and we will scale the axes to frame the data very tightly. 1) Open the Chart toolbar In Excel, it is convenient to use the Chart toolbar for formatting. To access this toolbar, pull down Excels View menu, highlight Toolbars, and select Chart from the submenu:

How to Format an Excel Graph--I Scaling the Axes Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

The Chart toolbar provides a menu of graph components that can be formatted. We will need to examine the settings for all of these chart components in order to prepare the best possible display. We here select the Y-axis for formatting.

How to Format an Excel Graph--I Scaling the Axes Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

2) Adjusting the Y-axis to Frame the data

Adjusting Axis markers from the Patterns tab After selecting the Y-axis, we open the Format dialog by selecting the adjacent button on the Chart toolbar. The Format Axis dialog box shows, and the Patterns tab is selected to adjust axis lines. We want to minimize the axis markers, using small crosses for major grids, and outside marks for minor grids.

How to Format an Excel Graph--I Scaling the Axes Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Adjusting the Scale from the Scale tab We next select the Scale tab and modify the maximum and minimum values of the Y-axis in order to frame the data tightly:

Usually, it is safe to use the minimum and maximum values of your data as the minimum and maximum values of your axis scales. The major and minor units are selected to show reasonable increments in the data set. We can also define the point where the X- and Y-axes cross; here we set that value to be the minimum Y-value, locating the axes intersection at the lower left edge of the plot. In order to save space here, we ignore Excels Font, Number and Alignment tabs, although these will require review any time a chart is to be displayed during a PowerPoint presentation.

How to Format an Excel Graph--I Scaling the Axes Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

3) Adjusting the X-axis to frame the data With the Y-axis scaled appropriately, we next modify the X-axis, selecting that axis on the Chart toolbars pulldown menu and then opening the Format dialog. Our modifications on the X-axis Patterns tab recreate our changes to the Y-axis patterns, so they are not shown here. Below we open the Scale tab and modify the maximum and minimum values of the X-axis in order to place data points on the boundaries of the visible plot:

When we select OK to accept these values, the graph takes the appearance shown in the next illustration:

How to Format an Excel Graph--I Scaling the Axes Jeffrey Donnell The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Both axes have now been scaled satisfactorily. At the end of this step, our scaled graph looks like this:

Our next steps will be to adjust the plots labels and legends, its background fill and, finally, to adjust the appearance of the data markers themselves. These steps will be addressed in the document How to Format an Excel Graph--II: Preparing the Scaled Graph for Display.