Consider this data. Imagine they have been received by doing some kind of survey where we are investigating the relationship between the amount of time spent studying and the score achieved. Each row represents the data for a different student. If you select the data and ask your spreadsheet to draw a graph, you get could some kind of nonsense. How to fix this?
- Chart 1 is the default graph if we select Time and Result columns. It takes the first column of values (Time) as labels, making for a strange X-Axis.
- If we add a column of labels (1-10), the result is not much better (Chart 2).
- To get the proper chart, we need to select Scatter as the format (Chart 3).
By using a scatter plot, we get a chart which shows how closely the two variables are related. In this case we can see that in general, if you study longer you will get a better mark.
Scatter Plots. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/scatter-xy-plots.html