Try a few of them out and see how well you like them. There are tons of choices that you can make here to liven up your chart’s appearance. If you want to add a bit more color and style to your scatter plot, check out the options available in the Design tab under Chart Tools. To do this, just click on the title to open the text box that contains it and edit it with your new description. With that annoying, useless little box gone, your chart should now look like the one in the screenshot below.Īnother thing that most everyone will want to change is the chart title for the scatter plot. From the list of expanded options, pick None to turn off the legend. If you’ve been “tabbing” around, go back to the Layout tab and click on Legend. The default legend that was created with the scatter plot serves no real purpose here, so let’s get rid of it. Similarly, you can create a label for the vertical axis, but you will have more choices for title placement here.

Click anywhere in that text box and edit the information to reflect the true title of the horizontal axis.

Choose Primary Horizontal Axis and then pick Title Below Axis.Ī text box with the default wording Axis Title will appear on the chart. Next, click on Axis Titles in the Labels section. To do this, select the Layout tab under Chart Tools. Most of these changes will be based on your own personal preferences, but there are a couple that we’ll discuss here.įirst, let’s label the horizontal axis. Step 4: Make any formatting or design changes you wish in the Design, Layout, and Format tabs located under Chart Tools on the Excel ribbon. If you want to move the chart to a new worksheet, click here for instructions. You can resize this chart window and drag it to any other part of the worksheet. Select the first item, Scatter with only Markers, from this box.Īfter making this selection, the initial scatter plot will be created in the same worksheet. Click on Scatter in the Charts section to expand the chart options box. Step 3: Open the Insert tab on the Excel ribbon. In this example, those columns are Hours Spent Studying and Exam Score. Step 2: Highlight the columns that contain the data you want to represent in the scatter plot. As an example in this tutorial, we’ll be using data consisting of hours spent studying and final exam scores for a select group of students. Step 1: Enter or copy/paste your data into an Excel worksheet. However, these steps can easily be adapted and used to create any of the other varieties of scatter plots in Excel. There are several different types of scatter plots that can be created in Microsoft Excel 2007, but we’ll focus on the most common variety – a scatter plot with only markers – in these instructions. This information could then be transformed into a scatter plot. To support this theory, you may gather information from several students consisting of the number of hours they spent studying and their final test scores. For instance, it’s generally believed that the amount of time spent studying for an exam has a direct influence on how well a student will perform on that exam. A scatter plot is a type of graph commonly used to represent the correlation between two different variables.

How to plot a graph in excel 2008