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Re: workshop physics excel tools



Thanks for the feedback, Richard. I do use many of these features of
Excel. The advantage of WPTools, I think, is that it takes
*significantly* fewer mouse clicks to do curve fits, overlay plots,
etc. Also, the default graph is better formatted than Excel's
default, with its gray background, lack of gridlines for the x-axis,
etc.

Thanks again,

AT

Aaron Titus, you asked about the Workshop Physics Tools for Excel. I
actually do not use them. There is so much functionality built into Excel
now that they are less useful.

For example, to get a linear least square fit to the data, follow these steps.
1. Make an XY Scatter plot of the data (which our lab did this week from
times of balls rolling down inclined planes).
2. Right click on a data point and select Add Trendline.
3. From the open dialogue box, select the default, "Linear." Also go to the
Options tab and "check" the boxes by "Display equation on chart" and
"Display R-squared on chart."
4. If necessary click on the equation to select it, and then click once
more to edit the equation to change Y and X to the correct variables and to
use the correct number of significant digits that you have from the data.

This is just an example of the present power of modern spreadsheets.

Richard Bowman, prof. of physics & dir. of academic computing
Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, VA 22812 USA