Tips to XY Plotting with Wingz

Wingz is a very powerful electronic spreadsheet. Its graphing capabilities surpasses most of its other competitors (except in their most recent versions). Wingz also is a presentation worksheet, i.e. it also has drawing tools and other features that allow the user to enhance the appearance of his or her report. Finally, Wingz has a built in "programming" language that allows the user to perform a repeated series of commands or to customize his or her work area.

In spite of these accolades there are some features of Wingz that are not intuitive even to an experienced Macintosh user. This is especially true when it comes to XY plots that are common in scientific applications. This handout presents the instructions for generating and manipulating XY plots; most of this information is available in the manual for Wingz , but it is not always obvious where to look to find it.

Initially generating an XY plot (and scatter plots)

1. Select two adjacent columns of numbers. If these columns have labels at the top, they can be used to label the axes.
2. Then select the chart tool. (The chart tool has the bar graph icon in the tool box on the left side of the screen.)
3. Place the pointer anywhere on the spreadsheet and drag out a box. At first some kind of bar graph will appear. Notice the handles on the edges and corners of the box. With these you may re-size the graph as desired. If the graph is selected (if so it will have the handles on the edges and corners), it can be re-positioned simply by dragging it to a new location.
4. Use the Graph pulldown menu, the Gallery submenu, and the XY (or Scatter) submenu. When you release the XY submenu, the bar graph will become an XY plot. (For the rest of this handout a series of commands in a pulldown menu with submenus will be referred to by the commands only, e.g., Graph, Gallery, XY.)
5. The defaults for XY plots are as follows:
   • Vertical columns are used. (This is called vertical parsing. If you want to plot data that is found in horizontal rows, select Graph, General, Horizontal Parsing. It is a good idea to structure your spreadsheet so you can use the default.)
   • Of the two columns selected the left column will be on the x-axis and the right column will be on the y-axis. (See below for how to specify which is which.)

Controlling the axis scale, major and minor grid lines

1. Select one of the two axes.
2. Select Graph, Axes, Scale Info. A dialog box appears that allows you to specify the minimum and maximum values and the number of major and minor grid lines.

Specifying the data plotted on each axis/plotting non-adjacent columns

1. Generate an XY plot as in A. above with any range of data.
2. Select a chart series on the graph by clicking on the symbol for a given plot in the graph legend. This will active the Series option in the Graph menu.
3. While holding down the command key [the apple], select two ranges (usually columns) one at a time. The first one selected will be the x-axis; the second one selected will be the y-axis. (This procedure is called command-dragging; it is the Wingz equivalent of shift-clicking or shift-dragging which allows you to keep items selected while you select additional items.)
4. Select Graph, Series, Range. The selected ranges of values will replace the original ones.

Plotting more than one function to the same set of independent variables

1. Select any chart series as in #2 immediately above.
2. Select Graph, Series, Add Series. This creates a new series that is identical to the selected chart series.

3. Change the new series as described above to plot the new data. (Often you will use the same range of data for the x-axis.)

Wingz has many other features of XY plotting and plotting in general. To learn about these you can look at the manual, read the on-line help feature, or explore the program by trying different things. (Don't worry; it's unlikely that you can hurt the program. You might crash the computer, but you can always start it up again.)

Last modified on December 30, 1994