CS 103 Day 8, Wednesday April 11, 2001

• Discussion of Wheat-based foods; differences in calories per ounce. Other HW.
• Discussion of Tufte readings (handout of answers.)
• Scatterplots, Chapter 4, all.  Text does a good job on use and interpretation.
• Slope of line (for HW):  amount y (vertical) stuff increases per unit increase in x (horizontal) stuff. "Rise/run."

Learning Excel:    Chapter 4, all, continued.   Use the text + Guide to Ch. 4 + Excel 97Charts (those are 2 handouts) to make the transition.
Comments, additions here:

• Selecting an element to format:  Sometimes, especially if the chart is crowded, it can be hard to click on the element you want to format.  Instead, you can: Right click up in the menu bar.  This gives a list of menu bars.  Click on  Chart. menu.  Then you'll get a floating Chart menu bar. In this, at the left is a Drop-down name box.  Click on the little down-arrow to get a list of all the elements in your chart, and pick the one you want.  (If it's not there (say, you want minor gridlines), you'll need to go to  Chart up in the main menu bar, choose Chart Options, and add the element you want).  Once your desired element is in the name box, click the icon with the hand to format it.
• Scale tab, formatting an axis: (find these things there)
• Logarithm scale on an axis:  Check box toward the bottom. You can switch this on and off. It graphs gridlines with the raw number labels but spaced like the logarithm of the numbers.
• Boundaries of an axis. (Min and max)  These are calculated automatically by Excel, if the boxes are checked.  If you are looking at a graph with filtering, it recalculates the min and max, so you aren't looking at the same window each time.  Uncheck the boxes and put in your own desired values to keep boundaries the same.