In Physics 50 you will make use of a script provided here to plot your data:
Go here to plot physics 50 data
Please note that use of the provided plotting script for plotting your data is required; plots and fits in Google sheets do not meet course expectations.
To plot your data you first need to generate a .CSV file containing only your data and axis labels. You can do this from within your Google Sheets spreadsheet.
Make (or go to) a tab in your spreadsheet that you will use specifically to prepare your data for plotting. In the sample pendulum data sheet shared with you, this is the second tab, “T vs. L_string Data for Plotting”.
If necessary, you should rename the column headings in Row 1 to match your data. These will form the axis labels for your plot. You may surround algebraic variables and Greek letters with dollar signs; e.g., $\theta$ (°) or $L$ (cm) or $T^2$ (s$^2$) or $L_{\rm string}$ (cm), where \rm “removes” math mode and lets you include normally-formatted text within a mathematical formula. Column headings have already been entered in the sample sheet.
Check that correct data entries prefilled into the plotting tab of the spreadsheet. Note the formatting that allows an entry to be copied from a previous sheet. For example: =’Data Collection’!B6 will copy the entry from cell B6 of the “Data Collection” tab into the new cell. Check to make sure that the entries are indeed the values you wish to export.
You should now go to the “File” menu and select “Download”. From within the download tab select “Comma Separated Values (.csv)” and save the file to your computer.
Now go to the Physics 50 Fitting Page. Under Data choose the .csv file you just saved. Under Kind select the type of fit you would like to perform.
The main plot should show the data points, error bars, fit function, fit information, and properly labeled axes. The small upper plot shows “residuals,” or the difference of each data point from the fit line or curve (along with the error bar of each data point). A plot of residuals like this can be very useful when the variation of data away from the fit function is too small to see on the main plot.
You can save the resulting plot by right clicking on the graph.