Spreadsheets in Physics Lab One week At Home Notes 1 This is a one week lab 2 This assignment can be done at home from a campus computer or from any other computer with Microsoft Excel and Word or equivalent programs installed 3 We recommend doing the lab early in the week rather than waiting until it is almost due If you have computer trouble you will want to have plenty of time to fix it before the deadline No excuses 4 Most labs this semester can be done with a partner but please do this exercise on your own 5 Getting help a Your lab TA can answer questions by email or during their office hours listed in the syllabus b You can also ask advice from lab partner s and or other students Objectives of this lab This lab will introduce you to using Microsoft Excel Many of you will know some of the skills already but we will definitely use more of Excel than most people know We will use it during the semester to analyze data make graphs do calculations and fit functions to data Note Excel is widely used in many jobs so the skills you learn here and practice all semester are defi nitely relevant to almost all careers Equipment A computer equipped with Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word or equivalent software For a free download of Excel and the rest of MS Office for your computer Mac and Windows go to iuware iu edu and search for Office 365 This will give you a free student license for installing the software on your personal machine Note that as an IUPUI student you also have free access to the cloud based version see this page from UITS to get started which is useful for remote collaboration with other lab group members Regarding Google Sheets We understand that some students prefer the collaborative and cloud based aspects of Google s applications Although this week the calculations can be done using Google Sheets future assignments will be more challenging if you do not use Microsoft Excel MS Office 365 is still the industry standard since not all companies will allow their data to be stored on the internet and this is required for Google Sheets and Office 365 now has collaborative editing features and cloud storage as well We encourage you to take this opportunity to use the free license and add a line to your resume by becoming proficient in MS Excel even if you generally prefer Google Note I have a Mac so the pictures included are from there but most of this is the same on Windows DOs DON Ts Don t worry if you know a lot of what is in this assignment or if you don t know much of it at all The point here is to get everyone to a baseline level of Excel skill then we ll practice applying these skills for the rest of the semester and your next physics course Do plan to use the skills you learn in this assignment throughout your physics courses Keep this document available as a reference Background Excel basics This section contains basic information and terminology regarding the use of spreadsheets It is intended for those students who have little previous experience working with spreadsheets For those students with a working knowledge of spreadsheets this should go very quickly Basic terminology 1 A spreadsheet is one file in Excel Google Sheets Numbers or a similar program 2 A tab also known as a worksheet One page in a spreadsheet You can add tabs in Excel by clicking on the sign near the lower left corner You can rename a tab by double clicking on its title 3 A column is a complete vertical set of cells It is designated by a letter 4 A row is a complete horizontal set of cells It is designated by a number 5 A cell is one item in the spreadsheet It may contain text a number or a function It is identified by a letter number pair e g A2 or Q38 indicating the column and row 6 A range is a set of cells that may be horizontal vertical or rectangular It is designated by the upper left and lower right cells in it separated by a colon Examples could be part of a column A3 A23 part of a row F3 P3 or a rectangle B2 V22 7 A function is literally a mathematical function It may contain numbers operators basic functions and references Note a function must always start with an equals sign A1 A2 A3 is a function that adds the numbers in three cells 8 An operator is one of the familiar mathematical operators and 9 A basic function is also from math examples are sum exp sin atan and sqrt Excel has MANY available modified Bessel functions anyone 10 A reference is the value in another cell named by its column and row as a pair e g A1 or D3 References will often serve as the variable in our functions 11 Some useful syntax is shown in Table 1 Function exponential Scientific notation Numbers or expressions as text Enclose in quotes Excel notation PI EXP x 3E 3 Syntax 2 PI 2 ex EXP x 3x10 3 3E 3 sin PI 2 6 Table 1 Useful syntax for Excel Spreadsheets To enter information in a cell just click in it and start typing What you type will appear in the cell and the formula bar near the top of the window labeled fx If you need to edit what you have typed you can work in the formula bar or double click in the cell If you type a function the function will be eval uated when you hit return or arrow to a new cell Now let s look at a bit of a spreadsheet Figure 1 below was produced on a Mac since I have one but the appearance on windows will not be too different In Figure 1 cell A2 has the word Text typed into it Cells B2 through G2 have various numbers and functions typed in quotes so they are not evaluated Cells B3 through G3 show how B2 through G2 are evaluated without the quotes Note that cells E3 and F3 refer to cells B3 and C3 Also note that cell E3 has been selected by clicking in it so it appears in the function bar above Also note that Excel always interprets the argument of sin cos etc in radians not degrees If you want to use degrees you have two choices sin radians x or sin x pi 180 Figure 1 Example Spreadsheet Activity 1 Complete these exercises on one Excel tab Exercise 1 Reproduce the figure above Exercise 2 Use Excel to calculate 4 to the third power You should be able to get 64 Exercise 3 Use Excel to calculate the area of a circle with a radius of 10 cm and to calculate the sin of 60 degrees which should turn out to be 3 2 0 866 Background Graphs in Excel Scatterplots Most graphs …