Making Charts in Excel 2007

Making Charts in Excel 2007 I have provided some simple instructions for making graphs or “charts” using an Excel 2007 program. This will save you a lot of time instead of graphing all the points by hand. Familiarize yourself with the flowing instructions. If you still have any problems, please come see me or contact me and I can walk you through this. Copying the data to a new spreadsheet 1) Open the Excel data file from my web page. 2) You are now going to create a separate excel spread sheet for the data from each location. First open a new “empty” spreadsheet. Click once on the symbol in the upper left corner of the page that looks like a series of four multicolored squares (quad). Choose , and then click on the option in the lower right hand corner of the page. A new blank spreadsheet should appear. 3) Save this on your computer (or disc, or thumbdrive, etc) as “Site 1”, or choose a name of your own. To save this sheet, click once on the icon in the upper left corner of the page that looks like a computer disc and change the name of the file to “Site 1” or the name of your choosing. Choose the location where you want this file stored on the pull down menu and then click in the lower right hand corner of the sheet. This can also be done by clicking once on the symbol and choosing on the menu. 4) To copy the data from the first (latitude 65.98N, longitude 2E), go back to the spreadsheet you opened from the web site and highlight all the data from the first site from block A1 to G40. This can be done two different ways. First click on the A1 block to high light it. The box containing “Latitude (deg)” should have a thick black outline around it. Now go to block G40 (containing only the number “1”), hold down the button on the computer and then click on block E40. All the data blocks from A1 to E40 should now be highlighted in grey. It is important that you hold down the before clicking on E40, or else you will need to begin from the beginning by going back up and highlighting block A1. 5) Now that the blocks are highlighted, you need to copy them. This can be done by pressing or by clicking once on the small icon of two pages below the scissors in the upper left corner of the page. A moving dashed line will appear around your data. Go back to your file “Site 1” and paste the data using the icon in the upper left corner or . The data for the first site should now appear in your “Site 1” spreadsheet. Click to save the data. 6) Widen each of the columns so you can view the data completely in each cell. In the upper header, the one containing the letters of each column, move the cursor over the line separating the columns (a vertical line with two arrows pointing away from each other will appear) and double click on the line. The column will automatically enlarge to show all the data clearly. Do this for each column. Plotting the depth and temperature data 7) Now we will plot Temperature vs. Depth. Highlight the data columns for temperature and depth (not the column names). Click on the first data block in the upper left corner (block A5 if you pasted into the first block, the block should have a “0” in it). Scroll down the B40, press and click on the B40 block. The can also be accomplished simply by beginning at A5, left click and hold the clicker down and scroll down to B40, then release the left click. All the data in the depth and temperature columns should be highlighted. 8) Go to the top of the page and click on the tab. Then click on the icon that appears to the right. Finally click on the picture of the first “scatter graph” in the lower menu that appears. A graph of depth vs. temperature should appear on the page. The axes are reversed, but this does not corrupt the data, just turn the graph on its side when you are interpreting it. If you want to change the axes you will need to do a few more steps. Changing the x-y axes orientation 9) To change the x and y-axes on the graph, click on the tab (if you have just plotted the graph, you may already have defaulted into this tab, you automatically go back to every time you click on the graph), click on the icon in the box at the top of the page. Click on the button and a box should appear on the screen with three lines in it, the first line should be blank, the second line will have “=Sheet1!$A$5:$A$40” in it and the third line will have “=Sheet1!$B$5:$B$40” in it. It will look like this: Line 1: Line 2: =Sheet1!$A$5:$A$40 Line 3: =Sheet1!$B$5:$B$40 You need to reverse what is in lines 2 and 3. This can be done by highlighting and copying and pasting. First copy the third line and paste it in the first blank line. Next copy the second line and paste it into the third line. Finally, cut the top line and paste it into the second line. The lines should now read: Line 1: Line 2: = Sheet1!$B$5:$B$40 Line 3: = Sheet1!$A$5:$A$40 Do not try to “cut” and “paste”. You will need to “copy” and “paste”. For some reason that I have yet to figure out, you can not leave some of the lines blank while you do the switching. After you have finished rearranging the lines, click to get out of that page, and then click again to return to the graph. 10) You may need to reverse the vertical axes of this new graph to get it to read “0” at the top with increasing depths going down. Right click on the vertical axes (you need to move the cursor over the numbers in the vertical axis). Choose , click on and then click . To put the vertical axis on the right side, right click on the horizontal axis numbers, choose , under “vertical axis crosses” click on . Click . Adding labels to the axes 11) To add axes labels, Click on at the top of the page, then click on , then click on , then click on