| New document – note, only one document per instance of program – but may have multiple instances of program open.
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| Open document – opens browse dialog for previously saved files. |
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| Save document – opens dialog to name and browse to folder for unnamed file, saves otherwise. |
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| Print – prints entire document as 8.5 x 11 in landscape – has given me problems on this network – interaction of current Mac OS 9.2 and printer driver causes a crash. Try your luck at your place. The work around that has served well is to print select parts from the file menu – select the graph by clicking on it, choose “print graph” from the file menu, select the data set by clicking on it, choose “print graph” from the file menu |
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| Page left, page right – browses current document, displays current page number.
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Toggle Data Browser – opens a dialog that displays all current data set columns. From here you may:
- Set column head names – click on the current name (probably x or y twice [not a double click] to select then type the new name)
- Create a new data set – makes additional empty columns with properties otherwise identical to those already existing.
- Make a new manual column – adds a column to the selected data set. Just select the desired data set, click make new column, fill in the dialog and click OK.
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Make new calculated column. This is a powerful time saver – allows you most common spreadsheet operations. Use *,/,+,- to indicate ordinary operations and select other functions from the list. Pi may be selected from the constants list, other constants may be manually entered into the equations line. Select data from the variables drop down.
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Import from TI device – opens a dialog to connect to a TI calculator – just select the port your connected on (if it hasn’t already figured it out), select “scan for device”, select all relevant data (CBL data is stored in the calculator lists, designated L1 – L6) and click OK.
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| Autoscale – most often we want the graph to represent all the student data without a unnecessary amount of white space. Once all data is present, this button automatically crops or expands to accommodate.
Sometimes the origin is desired but cropped out by autoscale – it can be manually inserted by selecting the numbers on the x and y axes nearest the origin and changing them to zero.
Caution – students may think that adding the point (0,0) to their data set is an appropriate solution.
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| Zoom-in/zoom-out – works as expected, zooming on the center of the graph if there is no selection. If a selection (just click and drag over data in the graph) is made, zooming crops or expands to display just the selected data. |
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| Examine – places a vertical line through the mouse pointer over the graph. Opens a small box that displays the coordinate of the point to which your pointer is nearest horizontally. Also places a bold box around the data in the data set. |
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| Tangent – fits a tangent line to the region of your graph nearest the pointer. The line is displayed through one point, the slope is of a regression line through that point and the two adjacent points. |
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| Statistics – brings up a box with min, max, median, count, standard deviation. This calculation makes no attempt to determine whether these statistics are relevant to the data at hand. |
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| Integral – shades the “area under the curve”. Calculates the area shaded based on the units used. You must determine those units. I think the program just adds polygons. |
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| Curve fit – brings up a dialog with a list of many different curves. The user must make an educated guess regarding the choice of functions. Choose one, select try fit, if you like the fit click OK, otherwise make another selection. |
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| Linear fit – drag a rectangle horizontally across the graph to cover the range of points desired, then select the linear fit button – a regression line with slope and y intercept is calculated. |
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