Tinkerplots

Adding Data:
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Getting Started:
1) Open TinkerPlots on your computer. You can do this by searching "TinkerPlots" under the start menu's "find" option. Once you open TinkerPlots you will have a blank canvas to start. It should look like the one below. 

2) Add the data you wish to analyze or look at.

2.1) Adding data from a table on a website:

2.1.1) TinkerPlots allows you to add data from any website that has a table of information on it. Go to the website in which you are wanting to analyze/look at data from. In this example I will be using a Wikipedia page that has a table about past U.S. Presidents. The website I am using looks like the one below. Notice how the the table is included in the website.  2.1.2) Next, you will want to copy the link of the URL of the page that the table is located on.

2.1.3) Go back to TinkerPlots. Click on the "file" button in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Then click on "Import from URL." When a box shows up, paste the URL into the box and then click "ok." The data will then take a few seconds to load onto TinkerPlots. 

2.1.4) Once the data has loaded, it will be placed into a new card. This card has all of the information for each of the people, objects, or subjects in your table. To look through each specific case click on the left and right arrows in the upper right hand corner of the card. This will scroll you through each individual case. 

2.2) Adding data from an Excel Spreadsheet: Data can also be transferred into TinkerPlots from Microsoft Excel.

2.2.1) Open up the Excel Spreadsheet that you wish transfer the information from. Select all of the data in the spreadsheet by clicking in the upper left hand corner of the spread sheet. (This button is outlined in red in the picture below.)  2.2.2) Right click this same button and click on copy. This will copy all of the information from the spreadsheet.

2.2.3) Open up a new TinkerPlot. The screen should be blank white as it was before.

2.2.4) Click the "cards" button in the upper right hand corner of your screen. Then drag your cursor over to the white space and drop the card there. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.2.5) Next, click on "edit" in the top left hand corner of the screen. Then click on "paste cases." This will then load all of the information from your spreadsheet onto the card in TinkerPlots.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.3)You can also load data onto TinkerPlots from a table in a Word document. You will just copy the entire table in the Word document and then add the cases just as you did with the Excel sheet.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.4) Adding your own data directly into TinkerPlots: If you do not already have data from the Internet or a spreadsheet. You may also add your data directly into TinkerPlots media type="custom" key="7271567"

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.4.1) First, open a new TinkerPlots. Click on the "cards" button in the upper left hand corner of the screen, like we did before, and drag the card onto the white space of TinkerPlots.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.4.2) Click on the card where it says " ". You will then be able to type your first attribute into this space. This will most likely be the name of the subject or person you are collecting data from. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.4.3) Press the "enter" key on your keyboard and the attribute has been added. You can continue this process as many times as you would like for as many attributes as you have.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.4.4) Then you will want to add what the value of each of these items are. If the attribute if name, then in the value column you will want to write the person's name. After you have filled in the values you will want to fill in the units. If the attribute is height, you typed in 60 for the value, then you will type in "inches" in the unit column. It is not necessary to fill in a unit for every attribute. I have done a sample set below. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.4.5) After you have filled in all of the information for the first case you can move onto your next case or subject. Click the right arrow in the upper right hand corner of the card to add a new case. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">2.4.6) Repeat the same process as many times as you need to until your collection is complete.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Plotting the Data media type="custom" key="7271661"
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">3) Once you have a collection filled out or uploaded onto TinkerPlots, you are ready to plot your data! Click "plot" in the upper left hand corner of your TinkerPlots screen. Drag the plot over to the white space just as you did earlier with the card. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">4) Your screen should now look similar to the one above.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Analyzing the Data:
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">5) Click on an attribute that you wish to analyze or compare to other cases in your data set.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">6)You can then press either of the "order" buttons in top tool bar. These buttons will organize the data based on smallest to largest values from either bottom to top or from left to right. The order will be color coded. Here is what my data set now looks like after pressing the order button. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">7)I organized my data by clicking the "age at inauguration" attribute and then I ordered my data from bottom to top. To see what the colors in the plot represent, click "key." You can also make the plot more organized by clicking the "stack" button. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">8) From the key, I can then see that the yellows and greens are a younger age and the blues and pinks are an older age. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">It is best if you just play around with the different graphing options yourself. You can click a different attribute while the ages are stacked and see if there are any other correlations between different attributes. You can also use different icons instead of the circles by clicking the drop down menu in the plot screen. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">9) In the picture above, I chose the Fuse Circular option. This puts each case in a somewhat pie chart. Looking at the pie chart you can see about what percentages were younger and which presidents were older when they were inaugurated. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">You can see which of the options is best for analyzing your specific data. Clicking on a specific dot or pie wedge will also tell you which specific case that is within your own data.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">10) Below I have a more simple set of data which just compares student's height, weight, and age. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">11) Here, I have order the student's age vertically. The youngest age is the lightest color and the oldest age is the darkest color. Say we want to find out if a person's height is related to their age. We predict that the older a person is, the taller they will be. To do this we will just click on the height attribute. Our new graph looks like the one below. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">12) In our new graph, the dots are still arranged by age, youngest at the bottom and oldest at the top. But now we look at our key and the colors now represent different heights. The darker the dot, the taller the student. So we see that there are very dark dots at the bottom of our graph, so our prediction relating height and age was incorrect. We can now conclude that height and age have no correlation. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">You can now compare many other values with each other and make predictions like we just did with age and height. Obviously with a more complex set of data the results will be more useful. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Now you are free to explore the tool! See what endless options you can do with TinkerPlots and your data sets! For more help with TinkerPlots please visit R:\TinkerPlots\TinkerPlots Help\Web Pages\TinkerPlotsMovies.html. Here you will find many useful videos on more things you can do with TinkerPlots.