HOW TO USE MICROSOFT EXCEL TO MAKE BAR GRAPHS SPECIFICALLY FOR WEEKLY CLASS PROGRESS
1. Open MS Excel
2. Save your blank spreadsheet. If you name it and save it right off the bat all you have to do is click the little floppy icon on the top toolbar to re-save it periodically as you work to safeguard against losing everything should your computer freeze.
Name the file: Click ‘File’ on top toolbar, ‘Save As’. You could name it something that identifies the benchmark / objectives you’re graphing and a date. For example: If you were a junior high math teacher working with benchmark 5’s objectives, for the week of 9/6/05, you may save it as bench5 9-06-05. Note that I used ‘-‘s instead of ‘/’s in the filename for the date because ‘/’s are not allowed in filenames.
Choose Where It Will Be Saved: It is best to save it to your home directory and you may want to make a new folder there called “Weekly Graphs” or something.
To Make a new folder in your home directory: Double-click the shortcut on the desktop of your teacher computer and on the top toolbar click ‘File’ and then ‘New’ and then “Folder”. You then get a folder named new folder with the words “New Folder” highlighted. You can immediately type the name you want. For example, Weekly Graphs.
To save to your home directory’s folder “Weekly Graphs”: From the ‘Save As’ window, click on the arrow to the right of the ‘Save In’ box to pull down the list of places on your computer. Click ‘Desktop’ and then double-click on the item ‘Mr. Smith’s Files on Server’ (look for your name here) and then, in the window will be all the folders and files in your home directory. Double-click on ‘Weekly Graphs’. It should now say ‘Weekly Graphs’ in the ‘Save In’ box. Once it’s named right click ‘Save’ to save.
3. To add text to a spreadsheet click on the cell where you wish to start the text and type what you want. It will appear in the cell and continue to cells to the right as you need more space. If you make a typo you can edit your typing within the ‘fx’ box where what you type also appears. Type in column headers, the names of the objectives and the class averages so it looks something like the screen shot below. It doesn’t matter what cells are used to make this chart.
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If you want to
edit a line of text, click on the cell where it starts, the whole line will
appear in the ‘fx’ box and you can edit it there. Press enter to replace the text
in the cell(s) when your done editing. Click the floppy icon in the
upper toolbar to re-new your save.
4. Highlight the data to be graphed by first highlighting the first column. Click the cell in the upper-left of this column and drag (move mouse while holding the left button down) to the cell in the lower left. It should look something like this…
Then, holding the control key down, click on the top cell in the column that contains the number (in example cell K10 where the 67 is) and drag down to the bottom number in this column. (in the example cell K12 where the 72 is) so that now both columns are highlighted and it looks something like below. (Note the control key allows to highlight a second area without losing the first one)
5. Make the graph by clicking
‘Insert’ on the top toolbar and then ‘Chart’. (Excel refers to graphs as
“Charts”) In the “Chart Wizard” window click column to highlight it on the
left side and then click to highlight the upper left choice on the right side
to get the simplest “Column Chart” (Excel calls a Bar Graph a Column Chart)
Click the ‘Finish’ Button and it will appear on your spreadsheet right over your data. But you can drag it to it’s own space. In our example it would then look like this…
6. Pretty-Up the graph. You don’t need the “Series 1” thing on the right so click once on it to select it, little black boxes appear on it’s borders, and then press the ‘delete’ key to clear it. Your graph re-adjusts it size to fit the area without the “Series 1” label now and should look like this…
Now it would be nice to add a title on the top of the graph. To do this move your mouse over the white area of the graph so that the ‘mouse-over message’ reads ‘chart area’. It may take a second with the mouse being still for the ‘mouse-over message to appear. When the mouse is in the ‘chart area’, right-click it to get a special menu and click ‘Chart Options’. In the resulting window, you should come onto the ‘Titles’ tab by default. In the ‘Chart Title blank type in an appropriate name for the chart and click ‘OK’. So, now your graph should look something like this with a title.
7. Print the graph by itself on an 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper. Click on the graph once to select it. Little black tabs will appear around it’s border to indicate it is selected. Then press the ‘control’ key and the ‘c’ key simultaneously to copy the graph onto the ‘clipboard’. Nothing happens that you can see but the image of the graph is in temporary memory. Open a new MS Word document. Set the view to ‘landscape’ (‘File’ on top toolbar, ‘Page Setup’, then click on ‘Landscape’ then ‘OK’) With the cursor in the upper right-hand corner of the Word Document press the ‘control’ key and the ‘v’ key simultaneously to paste the graph onto the Word document. It should appear right away. You will want to enlarge the graph to fit the whole paper. After pasting it in the graph should already be selected (has little black tabs around it’s border) but if it isn’t just click anywhere on the graph to select it. Drag the lower right corner’s black square down and to the lower right corner of the paper to enlarge the graph to fit the whole paper. By dragging on corner tabs the length - width proportions stay the same and the graph isn’t distorted. If you want to drag the whole thing around to center it on the paper better it will be much easier if you format the layout first by right-clicking anywhere on the graph and clicking ‘format picture’ in the menu. Then click on the ‘layout’ tab and click the picture of the dog labeled ‘behind text’ and click ‘OK’. Now anywhere you put the mouse over the graph you’ll get the “plus sign with arrows” cursor. When you have this cursor you can drag the graph anywhere to visually center it. It may be helpful to zoom out to fit the whole document on the screen. To do this, find where the percentage number appears on the top toolbar and the mouse-over message says, ‘zoom’. Pull down the menu and choose 50%. Print to any printer your computer is hooked up to and remember, it will be in black and white unless you have a color printer. The Konica printer in the front office area prints color.