To lead and excel

The past month of school has been pretty good. Infact, I think I may even be enjoying it.

But first things first. There are labs almost every week and unlike last time, we have to submit typed reports this time round. As such, I got very much more acquainted with Excel and Word because hand-drawn graphs look out of place in a typewritten lab report. And because I am very nice, I shall share with you all with I learnt. Haha.

The first thing I experimented with was with graphs. We all know that the automatic graphs that Excel creates are the ugliest things we can find to put in a lab report. So instead of inserting the monstrous grey boxes into the lab report I decided to google it a bit and found a website which documents how to create the perfect graph(which I can't for the life of me find now.)

Essentially it is about tweaking your graph such that it looks like a hand-drawn one. This involves changing the color of the background, inserting the minor axes, adding trendlines(if your data points are all over the place) and lastly making sure it doesn't look squashed when printed.

Also, I tried to insert equations into report. No no. Not the linear ones. The ones with integration signs and what have you- to make it look more professional(ahem). For one to do this, all you have to do is to follow the step by step instructions over at this webpage. Very useful for maths teachers- to-be. Now you know how your maths teachers do it. :)

Lastly, since in a lab report we have many sub and super scripts, I present to you the hotkeys associated with them already programmed in all word documents.

subscript = ctrl + =
superscript = ctrl + shift + =

Turning them on and off is a simple matter of hitting the right keys.