Generation of an X-Y plot using Excel (alternative view with small screen shots)

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Generation of an X-Y plot using Excel

Select the 2θ and intensity data using the mouse as shown below:

Insert an XY scatter plot. Choose the option that simply joins the data points with a solid line. Do not choose the option that shows the individual data points for this type of data. (It can be useful to show individual points when plotting a small range of data, but not for the whole PXRD data set.) Do not choose an option that smooths the data:

A plot will appear on top of the current worksheet as shown below. In the version of Excel used for these web pages (Microsoft Office 2010), the plot is superimposed on top of the worksheet and not as a separate tab by default, which is a bad default for producing a publication quality plot.

A right click of the mouse on a blank part of the plot reveals a menu with the option to move the chart to a separate tab as shown below:

The Move Chart option allows the tab for the plot to be renamed from the default text of “Chart 1” when it is moved as shown:

If you forget to do this, simply right mouse click on the default tab name of “Chart 1” and use the rename option.

A large plot is now visible but the default drawing options for X-Y graphs are very poor. In older versions of Excel (pre-2007), the default chart options were even worse than those seen below and included a grey background to the plot:

The default/automatic options for the plot chosen by Excel are particularly poor and so the plot as produced initially is not suitable for publication. The next steps show how to improve the plot.

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