Transcript
NARRATOR
This video shows how to draw scatter plots in Microsoft Excel. We'll use the data file W4_Apple_Amzn_returns.xlxs to draw a scatter plot of monthly stock returns for Apple and Amazon. The data file has three columns. The first column, Date, represents calendar months. The second column, Amazon, shows monthly stock returns for Amazon. And the third column, Apple, shows monthly stock returns for Apple.
We see in the month that ended on the 1st of January, 2018, Amazon had positive stock returns of about 24%, while Apple stock went down by about 1%. The data has 25 rows, including one row for the labels, which means that our data has 24 observations of monthly stock returns for the two firms.
Let's highlight our data columns Amazon and Apple by clicking on the columns B and C. Go to Insert. Look under Charts and choose Scatter, which is under the little graph that looks like a few unconnected dots scattered around. Excel will now make a scatter plot from the highlighted data.
A scatter plot helps you visualise how two sets of numerical values are related. Each dot represents two separate measurements for a single instance. So each dot represents one month. And Amazon stock returns for that month are plotted on the x-axis, while Apple returns are plotted on the y-axis.
Once we have a scatter plot, we can add a title. We want to describe both of our measurements in the title, so we'll call this Monthly Returns, Amazon versus Apple. Next, we need to add labels for the x and y-axis. Click on the Chart area.
Go to Add Chart element. Choose Axis Titles. And click on Primary Horizontal to add the x-axis label. And choose Primary Vertical for the y-axis label. It's important that the axis labels show the units of measurement. Both the x-axis and y-axis show percentage returns, so we label them accordingly.
It can be useful to change the position of the horizontal and vertical axes. To change the position of the vertical axis, right-click on the horizontal axis and choose Format Axis. We can move the vertical axis by changing the value of the horizontal axis at the point which it crosses the vertical axis.
If we want to move the vertical axis all the way to the left, we tick Axis value and type in the lowest value for the horizontal axis. The lowest value can be seen here under Bounds. It's minus 30. So we type minus 30 here and click Enter. The y-axis has now moved all the way to the left of the graph and crosses the x-axis at minus 30.
We can move the position of the horizontal axis in the same way. Right-click on the vertical axis and choose Format Axis. To move the horizontal axis down, tick Axis value and type in the lowest value for the vertical axis. The lower vertical bound for our plot is minus 25, so type in minus 25 and click Enter. The x-axis is now moved all the way to the bottom. And the graph or scatter plot is now less cluttered.