for those of you who have ANY skill in Excel at all...

[toph99]

i need some help. i am teh idiot when it comes to doing stuff in Excel. my physics teacher wants us to make 3 graphs for a set of data we got from an experiment. He wants a displacement-time graph, velocity-time and acceleration-time. I have the data for displacement time. To go from a displacement-time graph to a velocity-time graph you take the slope of the d-t line and you get your value for the v-t line. He said we should do this in excel and that you could use a formula to get excel to spit out the other two graphs from the set of data we have. i have NO clue how to do this or where to start. any advice would be appreciated

 

[rgwalt]

Unless you have a very "fine" data set (your data points are fairly close together) your v-t and a-t graphs won't really be worth anything to you. Did your teacher give you any info as to how he wants you to compute the slope at each point in time? You are essentially doing what is called a finite difference slope approximation. You can do forward FD, reverse FD, averaging, etc...

Ryan

 

[toph99]

the points are 0.1 seconds apart, but accuracy isn't what he wants from this. He wants us to get some familiarization with functions in excel etc. i even have all of the slopes written down already, here are a few:

0.1s 1.5
0.2s 2.5
0.3s 3.5
0.4s 4.3
0.5s 5.2
0.6s 6.0
0.7s 7.0
0.8s 7.8

this was an acceleration due to gravity lab
so now i just need to figure out how to get excel to find the slope between each point and make a graph with the new values

 

[AnimeKnight]

Okay... If you go to excel's help topic and type Slope this is what they tell you..


Show All


SLOPE
See Also

Returns the slope of the linear regression line through data points in known_y's and known_x's. The slope is the vertical distance divided by the horizontal distance between any two points on the line, which is the rate of change along the regression line.

Syntax

SLOPE(known_y's,known_x's)

Known_y's is an array or cell range of numeric dependent data points.

Known_x's is the set of independent data points.

Remarks

The arguments must be either numbers or names, arrays, or references that contain numbers.
If an array or reference argument contains text, logical values, or empty cells, those values are ignored; however, cells with the value zero are included.
If known_y's and known_x's are empty or have a different number of data points, SLOPE returns the #N/A error value.
The equation for the slope of the regression line is:


Example

The example may be easier to understand if you copy it to a blank worksheet.

How?

Create a blank workbook or worksheet.
Select the example in the Help topic. Do not select the row or column headers.


Selecting an example from Help

Press CTRL+C.
In the worksheet, select cell A1, and press CTRL+V.
To switch between viewing the results and viewing the formulas that return the results, press CTRL+` (grave accent), or on the Tools menu, point to Formula Auditing, and then click Formula Auditing Mode.


1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

A | B
------
y | x
---|---
2 | 6
3 | 5
9 | 11
1 | 7
8 | 5
7 | 4
5 | 4

Formula =SLOPE(A2:A8,B2:B8)

Description (Result)
Slope of the linear regression line through the data points above (0.305556)



hope this helps

 

[toph99]

thanks