POS 138 Quantitative Reasoning in Political Science

HW6: Create a bar chart with cross-national data for your data profile paper.

Due: Monday, midnight, September 14th.

Also check out:
Chart tip #4: Bar Chart Tips

Goal: To create a nice bar chart to be used in your data profile paper.

 Post the chart to Webboard in a Word file with a 300 summary.

Examples of cross-national rotated bar charts:
Child well-being Gun deaths  Health Care  Poverty Poverty2 Civic Participation
 

Standards for bar charts:

• Data should be sorted on the most significant variable (not alphabetically)
• Maximize the ratio of data-to-ink (avoid 3-D effects and extraneous elements).
• Precise labeling and definition of values.
• Multivariate displays of data are best (see the poverty chart, above)

Notes: In this lab exercise you will learn how to:

• create a rotated bar chart from your international data.

Step 1.  Organize your data

• No blank rows or columns between your data
• X-axis label cell is blank (cell A1, below)

Eventually, you will want the data to look something like the spreadsheet on the right (perhaps with just one data column).

Step 2: Sorting the data:

Remember to sort the data by selecting the entire row.  This is so you do not sort just one or a few columns and get the data all out of order.

Step 4: Creating the Chart:

Highlight the data matrix and Insert | Chart
and select the (rotated) bar chart:

Step 5. Fix the chart

Starting with this:

Ending with this:

or, with overlapping bars: