Fundamentals of Graphing – Interactive tutorial

BACK

Summary

What have you learned from these exercises? Given a set of quantitative data you should now be able to

• decide whether or not a graph is appropriate
• distinguish the dependent variable(s) from the independent variable
• prepare summary data for plotting
• calculate standard errors if appropriate
• choose a plot type based upon the nature of the variables
• place the variables on the appropriate axes
• generate a basic graph
• clean up and label your graph
• add appropriate trend line(s) if needed
• add error bars if needed
• write an informative caption

Remember that many of the "rules" presented here are not hard and fast. Depending on how a graph is used you may very well use grid lines, use standard deviations to represent error, or even extend a curve fit beyond the data range. For a presentation you may indeed want to use color, an exotic plot type, or even a three dimensional effect. The most important take home lesson is that when you prepare a figure, its appearance is for you to decide, not some anonymous computer programmer.