Software Reference Sheet: Inserting and Organizing Data in a Spreadsheet

Transcription

1 Inserting and formatting text Software Reference Sheet: Inserting and Organizing Data in a Spreadsheet Column headings are very important to include in your spreadsheet so that you can remember what the data mean. Furthermore, when you share your data with someone else, he or she can better interpret the data. In the column headings, you will also indicate the units for the measurements, such as cm for height and years for age. Without being careful and understanding which units are being used, your research will be prone to error. The constants in this example have no units. To make text bold, italics or underlined, select the cells you want to with the mouse by clicking on the first cell and then holding down the left of the mouse while highlighting the cells to the last cell. Make sure that he home tab is selected on the command bar at the top. After selecting, lift your finger and in the command bar click on B for bold, I for italics and U. Your text will now be bold. To create a border at the bottom part of the cell, click on the border icon to the right of the underline icon. A drop down list will come and you can select the option for the bottom only with thick border. Next, type in the other values for rows 2 and 3 in the image shown in the page before. If you are a male younger than 20 or a female younger than 18, insert 20 for male and 18 for female. We will do an estimate here, although the formulas are based on specified age range. You can do all sorts of formatting of the cells and we will only show a few here. Also as with many software programs, there is often more than one way to get a task accomplished. After working with a program for a while, you may get comfortable with particular ways of doing something. Here we will show you two ways to align and wrap text. Highlight one or more cells with the mouse. To align, you can then move the mouse to the alignment section in the command bar. There are icons to select for the way you want the text to look: aligned to right, to the left, centered from the top or bottom. For this exercise, let s have the numeric data aligned to the right and the text data aligned to the left. 1

2 Another way to get the alignment done is to right click on the mouse after selecting one or more cells. You will then get a box with the options shown below. You would select format cells and follow the instructions in the next box. You can adjust the width of columns and height of rows manually by left clicking on the line in the row or column headings and then moving to the column width or row height you would like. Often times when you type in text, it exceeds the width of the cell. You can adjust the width as described above and/or you can wrap text in one or more cells. As with aligning text, you can click on the icon in the command bar or right click on the cells and select format cells. When you select wrap text, the width of the column will stay the same, but the height of the row will become larger as the text is wrapped around in the cell. Part 3: Inserting Formulas Now you need to insert the formula to calculate the FEV1 normal value for your height and age. The formula for males and females is (C 1 *height) (C 2 *age) C 3. The * symbol is for multiplication. Some guidelines for inserting formulas 1. Multiplication and division are performed first in an equation before addition and subtraction. For instance, in the equation 5 3*height, the value for height would be multiplied by 3 before being subtracted from Parts of an equation in parentheses are conducted before the other operations in an equation. For instance, in the equation 3*(5 height), the value for height would be subtracted from 5 before being multiplied by 3. It is important to make sure that both sides of the parentheses are there and in the proper location. Otherwise, you may get an error message or do an incorrect calculation. 2

3 To insert the formula to calculate FEV1 normal for males, select cell I2. On the keyboard type =. This tells Excel that you will be typing in a formula instead of text or numeric data. After =, use the mouse to select cell D2. Then, move the cursor to the formula bar and type * for multiplication followed by selecting cell E2 for height. You can place parentheses around D2*E2 to make it easier to read. After this, you type in a minus sign followed by (F2*G2). Lastly subtract H2. The final equation should look like (D2*E2) (F2*G2) H2. After measuring your actual FEV1 in class, you will need to calculate the percentage. You can do this my hand or a calculator and then enter the values, or you can enter a formula like you have already done. The formula for the percentage should look like: (J2/I2)*100 Copying and pasting formulas and text To copy the formula of a cell, highlight the cell by clicking on it, for example I2, the FEV1 formula for males. Then, select the copy icon located at the left end of the command bar at the top. You will then notice that the selected cell flashes. Move the cursor to where you would like to paste the formula, in this case to I3. This will allow you to calculate normal FEV1 values for females. After selecting I3, select the paste icon. You can also right click on the mouse to copy and paste, or use shortcuts like control c and control v on the keyboard. If you want to copy the same formula into several cells in a row or column, you can highlight them all before pasting. The formula will be placed in all the cells. If you would like to copy the value and not the formula of a cell, copy as described above. Go to the cell where you want to insert the value. Right click on the mouse and select paste special. In the box that opens, select values and then ok as shown below. 3

4 To copy and paste text or numeric data, you just copy and paste. Text and numeric data without formulas will paste as it is shown in the original cell. Part 4: Making a graph 4.1 First enter the data After you collect the FEV1 data, create three columns headings: Sex (M or F), %FEV1, and Interpretation. You will have three columns similar to what is shown below. The data shown here are fake. You will use the data the students collected in class. Sex (M or F) %FEV1 Interpretation m 60 moderate f 90 normal m 50 moderate f 70 mild m 66 mild m 99 normal f 45 severe f 68 mild m 78 mild 4

5 Next, you will group the number of people (males and females combined) into the interpretation categories (normal, mild, moderate, and severe). For the practice data above, you would get columns of data as shown here. FEV1 Interpretation Count >80% predicted normal % predicted mild % predicted moderate 2 <50% predicted severe 1 Here are steps to create a chart. Highlight the cells for Interpretation and Count including the column headings. On the insert tab in the command bar, select the column chart. Click the thumbnail with the style you want to use. For this exercise, select the first 2D option. A chart appears as this one: Count Count normal mild moderate severe Now you can customize the chart to look like you want. Make sure that the chart is selected. At the very top of the command bar, there are three tabs for chart layout: Design, Layout and Format. Click on the tabs and explore your options to make the chart presentable and easy to interpret. 5