Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi I am doing a science project on nails and rust. I am already conducting my experiment but I do not know how to make a graph or chart with all of my data. Please can someone help me?!
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What grade are you in and have you done any graphing in math? Knowing this will help us give grade appropriate help.

Do you have access to Microsoft Excel? If so, use the chart / graph wizard in it to help you get what you want. If you can't figure it out, please advise what version of Excel you are using as Microsoft tends to change things from version to version.

I am in grade 7 and in math we have not learned any graph. But in science we have learned types of graplhs like bar, line, and pie grapghs. Also a chart, but that is it.

Do you have acess to a spreadsheet program (these days Microsoft Excel is by far the most common)?

If you do, all you need to make a variety of graphs is to enter your data into the cells and follow the graph-wizard instructions. The default toolbar has an icon that is the graph-wizard.

It'll do all kinds of graphs, labels, etc and these can be copy/pasted or saved into other formats for printing or sharing.

If you do not have a spreadsheet program, you can do what we used to do 25 years ago, which is to get some graph paper, draw an axis and plot data points. I can't remember when we first did this in school...I think it was 5th or 6th grade, but if iyou have not done anything like this before you may need some help from an instructor, your parents or an older friend/sibling to get the basic idea.

Generally you draw a line going up and a line going to the right, with them meeting on the left, lower side of the graph paper. You choose ranges based on your data...if you measured temperature over a period of time, you'd make one axis time and the other temperature, and use the graph divisions to match your data range. (if you went from freezing to boiling in 10 minutes, your temperature-in degrees C axis would have a range of 0 to 100, and your time axis would have minutes from 0 to 10)

Take your data and plot it on the graph...if it was 60 degrees 5 minutes in you'd go halfway down the time axis and 60% of the way up the temperature axis. When all the points are plotted, you just connect the dots (for a line graph).