IG+-+Drawing+Effective+Graphs

Drawing Effective Graphs for IGCSE
Drawing effective graphs is a key skill for all science students. The guidance in the document below, along with questions designed to help you practise drawing graphs, is designed to help you build good graphs skills for use in lab reports and assessments.

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Additional notes for IGCSE assessments:
 * **Titles are not needed** for graphs produced for assessments
 * IGCSE graphs often ask for line graphs to be joined point-to-point rather than for best-fit lines/curves to be drawn. Best-fit lines are better in most situations, but if the graph is part of a question, **follow the guidance**.
 * **Questions often specify the graph type** for you, along with the data to plot.

When producing graphs in MS Excel:
 * Bar charts are called **Column charts**
 * **Don't use line graphs**. What excel describes are as a line graph is not a useful option and almost always leads to errors. **Use X-Y scatter graphs** this is a real line graph and gives you more options such as automatically fitted trend lines.
 * Only include a legend if you are plotting more than one series of data
 * **Avoid using 3D effects and shadows** - these make it harder to read exact data values from your graph