Activity 1.2

Medical Data and Class Data: Graphs with Excel

10 points

Due at the beginning of class, Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Microsoft Excel is a powerful computer program that allows you to manipulate data and create graphs. (In Excel, a graph is also called a chart.) In this activity, you will use Excel to create bar graphs and pie charts and more importantly, you will use these charts to help understand and interpret the data. Consider the following data on principal reasons given by patients for emergency room visits in 2005. (Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2008)

 
A
B
1
Reason
Number of Visits (in thousands)
2
Accidents
3,302
3
Arm/leg injuries
1,568
4
Back symptoms
2,918
5
Breathing problems
4,332
6
Chest pain
5,812
7
Cough/throat symptoms
5,537
8
Earache/ear infection
1,707
9
Fever
5,042
10
Head/neck symptoms
4,642
11
Nausea/dizziness
5,584
12
Non-specific pain
2,554
13
Skin rashes
1,548
14
Stomach pain
7,833

1. What type of graph or chart would help you interpret the data?

2. Explain why a bar graph is appropriate for this data?

3. Use Excel to create a bar graph of these data.

4. Explain what your bar graph shows that the original data table did not show.

5. Now you’ll use Excel to create a pie chart of these data.

6. Is there any information in your pie chart that was not in the bar graph? Explain.

7. Now, suppose the following data on number of miles from the college to home was collected from a group of seven students. Use Excel to create a pie chart for this data set and explain what your pie chart shows. (Think about how you want your pie chart to show the data. You will need to put the data into categories first. You can use columns D and E of the same Excel worksheet.) How does your pie chart help you understand the data?

Student
Miles
Ben
42
William
32
Hines
56
Rashard
89
Santonio
59
Heath
137
Michael
16

8. Now instruct Excel to convert the pie chart you created to a bar graph.

9. Which of the two charts do you think is more helpful to understand the data in #7 and why?

Summary
In this activity, you learned to enter data in an Excel file and created bar and pie charts using Excel. You also learned how to save an Excel file and to work with more than one worksheet within an Excel workbook. You learned that sometimes it is necessary to group the data to create an appropriate pie chart.