Displaying data in a chart

I am going to tech you how to make some very simple charts to display your data. This page is written for Y7 students but will be useful for all of those who want to display data in charts for school projects and coursework.

For those of you who are at a more advanced level you may find the link below useful. It will teach you how to make more complicated charts to display your data!

There are lots of different sort of chart you can use to display data, but they can be split into theree main types:

Bar or column charts help you to see how two or more separate entities (such as grades, years, different metals, animals, fish, countries) compare to each other. It is for displaying categoric variables.

One of the values will be a word (or year) - the other a number.

Pie charts help you to see how the 'whole' is made up of various entities - to see the proportion of the contributions.

Data for this type is often expressed as a percentage.

Line Graphs help you to see how two continuous variables relate to one another.

This is the type you will need for science - both sets of data that you are going to compare will be made up of numbers.

On the top menubar you will see the chartwizard icon. It looks like a little bar chart.

If you click on it the first page of the chart wizard will open.

Take a look at the options open to you. We are going to look in detail at the Column or Bar chart, the Pie chart and the XY scatter chart which will allow you to draw a line graph for science.