41000 - Business Statistics Chicago Booth Professor: Drew Creal

STATISTICS IN EXCEL - TUTORIAL FOR MAC Tutorial 3. How to Make a Time Series Plot

1. Open your data on Excel. For example use the file realGDPgrowth.xlsx from the course website

2. There are some green icons labeled Home, Tables, Charts, etc

3. Click on “Charts”

4. Click on line and select the first option

5. A blank chart area will appear

6. Right click on the chart area and click on select data

7. The following box comes up

8. Click on Add under the box on the left hand side. Series 1 appears

9. In the Name Field you can type a name for the time series corresponding to series 1 or you can click on the arrow and select the cell on Excel that contains the name of the variable. In the example the cell is B1.

10. To select the time series data that you want to plot click on the red arrow by the “Y values” field

and select the data (Data in Column B in this example)

11. To select the dates click on the red arrow by the field “Category (X) axis labels” and select the dates on the spread sheet (Data in Column A in this Example). Then hit OK. After steps 9-11 the dialog box looks like

12. Hit OK and a chart like the following will appear

13. Rearrange some of the elements and you get

14. To move the X-axis labels to the bottom of the chart, step on the X-axis and right click. Select

Format Axis

15. The following dialog box comes up. Click on Ticks. Select Low in the Axis Labels Box

16. The chart now looks as follows

17. To have a thinner line click on the line and right click. Select Format Line

18. Go to Line and select Weight & Arrows. Then change the line thickness by clicking on the arrows

by the field “Weight”. Then hit OK

19. Hit OK, the time series plot looks like: