Classwork 1

Welcome to CHEM 261 ! We hope you all get an AA!

MAKING PLOTS USING EXCEL:
In our first lecture, we will learn a few tips about making plots using Excel.
Please follow the steps below:
1- Open the Excel program. Enter the data into the worksheet as shown below. Your computer may accept
numbers with decimal points (for example 1.09) or with commas (1,09). To test which one is accepted as a
number, write this number into a cell. If Excel accepts it as a number then the number will shift to the right in the
cell. Otherwise, it will not shift!
To make the cells and numbers look like the ones in the picture, select the cells with the numbers in them and right
click. Choose ‘format cells’. On the new pop-up window, under ‘Number’ choose category as ‘Number’ and adjust
the decimal places if necessary:

2- Now you need to create a chart. FIRST select the columns

under Circumference and Radius. On the main menu bar, click on
Insert. A new sub menu bar will appear.
Click on Charts and then click on the Scatter chart. Here, select the
scatter chart WITHOUT ANY lines in it (the topmost left one).

You now have a chart with Radius in the x­axis and Circumference
in the y­axis!
3­ On the plot you see “Chart Title”. Click on the + sign that appears on the upper right corner of the plot. You
will see a list of “CHART ELEMENTS”. You see Chart Title because the box next to it is checked. You also see
the “Axes” and “Gridlines” already checked. 
Uncheck these boxes and see what happens. 
Check them again.
4­  Make sure that you have “Axes”, “Axis  Titles”, “Chart Title”,  and “Gridlines”  checked  in the “CHART
ELEMENTS” list. 

Rules: 

a- You should always place units in the Axis Titles. (Your units in this exercise are cm, centimeters)
b- It is attractive to add appropriate symbols in the title.
5­ Now we will change the “Chart Title” to say “Calculation of ”. 
Click on “Chart Title”. A box will appear around it.
Go into the box with the cursor and click several times until all the text becomes gray.
Type “Calculation of p”.
Make p gray. Under the “HOME” tab in the top menu there is a box saying “Calibri”, 14, etc. Calibri is the font of
the text.
Change “Calibri” to “Symbol”. Your Chart Title will become “Calculation of ”.
Change “Calculation of ” to “Calculation of ”. You can do this by selecting clicking the “B” under the box

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where it says “Calibri” (or “Calibri (Body)”).
 6­ Now change the text in the “Axis Title” boxes so that your plot looks like this: 

marke
r

Rules: 

c- Your “marker” should look like “o”, empty circles with black borders, if you have only 1 set of data.

7­ Now let’s change your marker.

Right-Click on a marker ONCE. All the markers will be highlighted. A menu will appear. Select “Format
Data Series”. Then make changes as pictured below (pay attention to the big arrows):

→ →
Now your plot should look like this:

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8- Since the relationship between the circumference and the radius is linear, we can expect the plotted data to
form a straight line in the form of y = mx + b.
Add a trendline to the graph (make the computer draw the best-fit line to the data). You should also display
the equation and the R-squared value on the graph.
To add the trend line, CLICK ON the + on the top right corner of the plot. Select the “Trendline”.
Automatically a linear trendline will appear. BUT it will be BLUE and DOTTED.

Rules: 

d- Your “trendline” should be a “solid” (not dotted) black line.

To make your trendline obey this rule, first, click on it. The “Format Trendline” menu will appear on the right
of the page. Make the changes as pictured below:

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 ALSO Change the “Dash
type” to “____________”

→
Finally make the following selections:

Click on these
two.

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You now have a linear equation with the slope and the y-intercept on your plot!

Move the text box with the equation and the R2 to a clear part of the plot, AWAY from the markers.

9- You should find it odd that the equation displayed on the graph is y = 6.179x + 0.2327. After all, we did
not measure y's and x's, but rather we measured circumferences (C's) and radii (r's).

Rules: 

e- Change the displayed equation to match your measured variables.

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To change the equation, simply click on the equation and change the variables. The screen shot to the right
shows how we made our equation more representative of the experiment. Recall that the governing equation
of this experiment is C = 2r.

→By doing this step, you are telling me that you really do understand what was actually measured and how well
the theory matched the experiment (If R2 is very close to 1, it means that the theory can predict the experiment
very well) .

10- Simply making the graph is not all that is required of the chemistry student. The real job of the
chemistry student is to determine which principles (if any) were verified by the laboratory experiment. You
must constantly ask yourself: "Which chemical or physical principle was this experiment designed to show?"
and "Did the experiment actually verify the theory?"

In this example experiment, we hoped to show that if we plotted the circumferences of several circles versus
their radii, the slope of the resulting graph should equal 2. We have a very nice graph, but we have not
determined if the experiment actually verified the formula C = 2r!

You should expect by now that we can use Excel to compare the
experimental slope to the theoretical slope. Another way of
stating this is what is our experimental value of ? The screen
shot to the right shows how we used Excel to do this. Our slope
was determined to be 6.179. (No units, right?!) The theoretical
value of the slope is equal to 2, or  = slope/2.

The formula in cell E3 (=(E1)/2) gives the experimental value of  to be 3.09. The formula in cell E4 gives
the percent error between the actual and experimental values. As you can see, an error of only 1.66%
indicates that the student performed this lab very carefully!

→Note that in our percent error formula (cell E4 above) we did not explicitly multiply the result by 100%.
Instead, we simply calculated the fraction and then clicked on the Percent Style button, .

So here is what the finished worksheet might look like:

USING ERROR BARS:

In this example, we measure the mass and volume of various quantities of water. By plotting mass versus volume,
we may determine the density of water from the graph's slope. Recall that M = V. The measured data and the
resulting plot are shown below. CREATE a worksheet IN THE SAME FILE that looks like the one below:

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Our slope shows tells us that we are within approximately 2% of the accepted density value of 1000kg/m3.
However, what we don't know is the quality of our data points. They seem to lie close to the line, but we
really should display error bars to be certain.

It was determined that the uncertainty of the mass measurement was ± 10kg and the volume measurement
had an uncertainty of ± 0.006m3. These uncertainty values will be used error bars on the graph.

Adding error bars in Excel is easy. Here's how:

Click on this

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 Vertical error bars
(related to y-axis
uncertainty)

Horizontal error
bars(related to x-
axis uncertainty)

Click on this and

The error bars will show but their “length” are not related to the 10 kg or 0.006 m3 you wrote earlier. When
you click on “More Options” a “Format Error Bars” menu will appear on the right of the screen:

Initially the options for the HORIZONTAL ERROR BAR shows.

Make the menu on your computer look like the one on the left.

Then change to VERTICAL ERROR BAR (select them on the graph

itself)