How To Plot X And Y Values In Numbers

You can use a special type of chart in Numbers to plot points on a graph. To make it look like graph paper you can adjust the chart in several ways.



Check out How To Plot X And Y Values In Numbers at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to plot X and Y values in Mac Numbers.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Now Numbers has a lot of great options for creating charts from values in Tables. A chart you may want to create involves plotting X and Y values. It's not immediately obvious how to do this. But it can be done in Numbers. Let's look at an example. So I've got a Table here and I want to put in some values. These will be X and Y values that I want to plot on a graph. I'm going to paste the values in here and notice that I'm pasting it in the first two columns here that are regular columns. I'm not using this column which is a Header column. This is a mistake that a lot of people make that can be very frustrating because when you're going to plot X and Y values it's important not to put the values in the Header column. The Header should be where the identification for each record it. So something like A, B, C if you wanted to name these points. But the actual values go in regular columns. You can just get rid of the Header column if you don't need it or you can leave it there. It won't be used. Let's get rid of the extra columns here and extra rows so those aren't in the way.
Now let's plot this. I'm going to label this column X and this column Y and I'm going to select both of these columns. Now I'm going to go to Chart and the type of chart I'm going to use is a scatter plot right here. Once I do that it will plot those points on this chart. Let's move up here next to our Table. Now let's make this look a little bit more like a graph. So under Format, Chart I'm going to change a few things. Let's get rid of the Legend here. Then let's go to Axis and I'm going to select the X axis first. Let's go and set the scale because sometimes you don't have the scale where you want it to be. For instance, if we wanted this to be negative 20 to 20 you could see it automatically figured out that negative 10 to 10 was the right scale to use. It doesn't mean that's what we want. So let's explicitly set that. I'm going to set it to 10 to negative 10. You can also set the scale here at the bottom. Right now you could see you've got it going through these different steps here, like 2½ for each one. So let's increase this. Let's go all the way up to 20. So each number is represented here. Let's go down to major grid lines.Turn that on. Set it to something smaller than one point, like half a point there. Let's make it kind of a grey color like that. So now we have a grid line for every number.
Now let's go to the Y value. Here let's change the max to 10 and the min to negative 10 and also set major steps to 20. This already has the grid lines set to half a point and grey here. We'll make it the same grey. Now let's make these square because these should be kind of square like graph paper. So we could adjust it like that. We can see the width and height on the right so we could set this to the same and then we should get nice squares there.
Now let's go to Series. In Series here we could see the X and Y columns are used for the X and Y values. The name for each point is set to the first column there. The Header column. Which would be great if it actually labeled these points A, B, C, etc. It doesn't. I don't know why Numbers doesn't do this. It would be great if Apple added this at some point. All you can do here is actually add value labels. So the Y value or probably what you want is X and Y. So you can get those here. Then the font size for those should be adjusted with the Chart font here. So I can lower the points there and make that a little smaller. So you may want this or you may not.
The Data Symbols you can change. So here we have circle but we can change it to something else like a plus or a diamond or triangle. Let's stick with the circle but for size let's actually set it to the smallest size which is actually 2. Now we have these little points here. Now one thing you may want to do with these graphs is actually set a trend line. This is very common in schoolwork involving math and science. If you want a trend line you could add a linear trend line like that. Now let's say you wanted to change the color of these points. You could do that. The trick is to select the Series inside the chart. So, if I click on these dots here you could see now the dots are selected. Now the sidebar changes. So I've got the Series here shown. That's all I can access. Just this one series and there's a new Style Sidebar. So I could go to the Style Sidebar and here you could see I could set this symbol and the size here as well. I can even change the Fill. If I want these to be a larger size, like this, I could then go and have, say, a color fill or gradient fill in them. But to change the general color I would just go here and change the Stroke. So let's go and set these to say red if I want. Now you could see those dots are red. You could see the Fill is set to stripe color. So if you want you could actually set these to a Color Fill. Make the color fill something. Let's do red here and set the Stroke to None. Now you get even smaller points. So if you wanted points that were smaller than that 2 setting this is how to do it. Also note you can set a Shadow for these. So you can see here the Blur amount, the Offset. So let's set the Offset to something small and the angle so it's off to the bottom right. Let's reduce the Blur as well. Now you can see I've got these shadows here which makes them standout from the grid a little more.
So you can use this for any number of points that you want. It could be the result of a science experiment. It could be something you're doing for math or science class. I've created a series of points that make a drawing. I'll paste those in. You could see this long list of points here actually plots out the smiley face on a graph.
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.Related Subjects: Numbers (134 videos)
Related Video Tutorials:
Including a Plus Symbol Before Values In Mac Numbers ― Creating a Form In Mac Numbers Using a Script ― Sorting By Last Name in Mac Numbers