Entering Some Data

Before you can plot anything, you need a table of data! GraPL can acquire tables in several ways, or of course you can simply define a new table and type in the numbers. In this case, the easy way is to use the clipboard ... simply copy the table below (including the heading row) from the help file to the clipboard and select ‘Edit,Paste as New sheet ...’ to include it in your project.

Year,Debt,Event
1688,0.2,Revolution
1701,1.3,Accession of Queen Anne
1714,3.2,Accession of George 1st
1727,2.4,Accession of George 2nd
1739,2.1,Beginning of Spanish War
1748,3,End of Spanish War
1755,2.2,Beginning of Continental War
1762,4.8,End of Continental War
1775,4.4,Beginning of American War
1784,9.2,End of American War

You will be asked if you want to use the first row as the table headers (say “Yes”) and then you can check on the data-sheet properties, which is a good place to give the sheet a sensible name, such as ‘Playfair Data’. Typically you would add extra information such as the units of the data, in this case Millions of Pounds.

You should see that the column names have been set to ‘Year,Debt,Event’, matching the pasted data. Press OK to have GraPL add the data sheet, and then you can set the column widths to something comfortable by dragging the header row (double-click on the gap between two headers to size a column automatically). Your data should look very like this:

If you don’t like the arrangement of the columns, select Options,Preferences and make sure that you have enabled column dragging. You can also play with column sorting by enabling the one-click sort on the column headers. With time-based data like this, it is usually safer to leave this option disabled!

Remember what you called your columns! The next stage is to plot the ‘Debt’ column as a linegraph – column names can be anything you like, including blanks, but it usually makes life easier to use short, simple, memorable names here.

Continue to: Making a Linegraph