Hi everybody. This is Jeff, from the library, and today we are going to talk about how to create
a table, or you might call it a figure. Let's say you have an assignment in which you have to,
in your paper, you have to present a table, or as it's called by APA, a figure of data.
So that may sound overwhelming and that may sound hard to do it's actually pretty easy if you use
Excel. This is Microsoft Excel I have open here. I have some data typed in here and
we're going to create a visual table from this. And I'm only going to cover the basics of this,
someone who's done this a lot, I'm not going to get into the advanced aspects of this,
this is for a basic assignment where you just need to create a figure and present it in APA format.
So again, just going to cover the basics if you haven't done this before or you just need
a reminder of how to do the basics. If you want to go beyond this and do something more advanced,
that's great but I'm just going to show you the absolute basics. So let's say I wanted to,
I manage a library, so let's say I wanted to create a table that showed how many people were
using library databases. So I have here, I just put in some data, and again this is Microsoft
Excel. And in these columns, here's January 2020, February 2020, March 2020, April 2020. So, I just
have all these months going from January to August of 2020, then over here I have number of users,
and then I just have some made up numbers, here these aren't our actual numbers, the numbers
would be much higher than this, but these are just some numbers I made up to put in here. So,
this is data that I have, and because this isn't really that nice looking, it's just some numbers
and it's kind of a little hard to read to make sense of it. A lot of times it would be much
more effective in a paper or a presentation to make this into some kind of a visual table.
So, this, it's really easy once you have the data in here for what you want to present.
That's really the hardest part is coming up what kind, with what kind of data you want to present.
so, once you have that typed in there, I'm just going to highlight
all these cells that have data in there. Then I'm going to go up here to insert, and for insert,
here are the charts. they call these charts in Excel. And I usually go to recommended charts, you
could choose any one of these different styles of charts, but I usually go here, recommended charts.
And it's giving me a little a little preview of the different styles of these charts. This is the
one I want to put in. I want to put in a nice bar graph. but there's all these different options of
how things could look and if you want to see all the options you could go to all charts and look at
all the different options they have in there. But I'm just going to show a bar graph here,
then I'll click O.K. And look at that. It creates this really nice chart, nice and simple.
and I might want to give this, I'll change this a little bit. I can click there,
and they have number of users I might want to say something a little more specific,
like library database users. you can change this to whatever you want and you can really, you can
edit this. You can change things, you can, you can add chart elements. it just has the basics.
you could add a legend, that would be nice. for this one, I don't really need a legend it's pretty
obvious what I'm doing, but you see there, you could add different things that you want.
I could go here to let's see, you can change the style here
you can set up all filters. you can do whatever you want. I'm just going to keep it nice and
simple though. These numbers, I would like to change. I'd like to see a comma in there
on the numbers. So, I'm going to click there then I'm going to right click here and format
a chart area. And actually, that wasn't the right thing, let me try this again. Let me close that.
Here we go, so I clicked on the right clicked and then I want to
format the axis. Let's do that again. So, I'm going to right click here and let's see
I'm going to right click right on that line. O.K. so that's the key. I click here right click,
off of the data, there you go right click, right on one of those lines there,
and this, is you can see it's a little, it can be a little tricky.
There we go, format axis. that's what I'm looking for. Now on this axis I want
to format the numbers so I'm going to click that little drop down by number.
I'll change the category to number and then I definitely want that comma there,
and I don't want any decimal places so I'm going to put that. We'll close that, now we have those
nice commas in there for the numbers. O.K. so now I've got the table ready. I want to
copy this and take this to my Word document in my paper. So, I'm going to right click on here copy,
then I'm going to go into my paper here that I'm typing up. and what you want to do first
is put in "Figure 1" or whatever number this is, if you have more than one figure.
Figure 1. make sure it's double spaced. Now I'm going to type in a title for this. So, library
database users by month. O.K. and this gets italicized for APA. this, you make bold.
Now I can just hit CTRL+V and I can drop my table in there, or my figure. and then at the
bottom here I'm going to add a note. and this is going to add a little more detail "Database users
include users of all of the library's
databases
regardless of vendor platform or type of database." Again I'm not putting a lot of
work into this, I'm just going to try to show you how this works. so, there you have it. Figure 1,
that's got to be bold. library database users by month, make that italicized.
just copy and paste the table in there. You can make this bigger or smaller if you'd like
and then add a note to the bottom to add a little more detail. This
is generally what people are looking for, what your instructor will be looking for
when you're asked to add a table or a figure to one of your papers. so that's, it's pretty easy.
Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks a lot for watching, bye.