Google Sheets: Graphing with separate (custom) Error Bars of Standard Deviation.

Here is a short tutorial using Google Sheets to convert a simple data table into a scatter plot graph with error bars of standard deviation. I made this for my biology students, but hope it helps others as well.
As of Nov. 2019, Excel can still do this much faster and I've made a video to walk you through it using Excel here: • Excel: Graphing with s...
This video was made using Google Sheets on a MacBook Air with Quicktime.

[@cream8245]

this video saved my ass ive been trying to do this for a few hours💀 I ❤ PETER STANLEY !THANK YOU SO MUCH!

[@user-id4ex6qy6y]

Hey brother, my students have seen your videos and you have saved them a lot of time and confusion. I really appreciate your help and please continue to keep up the good work.

[@et8387]

This video is saving my day Thank you!!

[@PeterStanley]

Cheers- glad it helped.

[@samgao3714]

my guy coming in clutch

[@PeterStanley]

I've got your back!

[@jessnorwood3450]

You’ve helped me sooo much! THANKYOU 👏🏻

[@KokoroAnita]

Seriously helpful, and quite understandable! Thanks for saving my lab report!

[@yaboikillermemestar5665]

Thank you so much! I would not have been able to figure this out without this video

[@bettinagranda2931]

thank you so much! you saved me so much time from trying to figure this out on my own!

[@bendavis2835]

Fantastic. Simple and it works. You have saved me hours.

[@crrz]

Great Video I was trying to figure out how to do this in sheets.

[@keepcalm5706]

I appreciate your effort, thank you.

[@MisssCooCo]

Thank you so much !!! you saved my lab report !!

[@PeterStanley]

Glad it helped!

[@simonvutov7575]

THANK YOU, it seriously saved me

[@StrmAce]

Thank you! You saved me!

[@milanleysen2068]

KING 👑

[@MattKeillor]

Thank you!

[@jamesgrogan1484]

life save thank you so much

[@abigailkartheiser4488]

Thank youuuuu! Very helpful.

[@PeterStanley]

You're welcome!

[@catherinealektiar4460]

Thank you so much!

[@kevinkinney8527]

Wow! I am alternating between "this is idiotic" for the situation and "Brilliant" for the workaround. My thanks- though I suspect my students will *not* thank you right away.

[@PeterStanley]

Couldn't agree with you more. Wish they made this a bit easier for us all.

[@tausiftt5238]

thanks that was so helpful!!!!

[@PeterStanley]

thanks for the comment, I'm glad it helped.

[@ziziisme]

Thank u this was so helpful

[@PeterStanley]

great to hear, cheers √

[@enmodo]

Oh wow, that was painful. I think I won't bother now! I got here because I thought picking "standard deviation" would help me - like it would compute the standard deviation of my series and use that for each point, but no. Wouldn't it be nice if they allowed you to just pick another column for error bars values? Did some more research on this - when you use "Standard deviation" it computes STDDEV of the entire series and the plots the error bars for each point centered around the median of the series. The number you enter is a multiplier on STDDEV so 1 for +- 1 standard deviation. This only works for a normally distributed series about a mean. You can't use it for an X-Y plot of a variable and a dependent value. There is a feature of charts where you enter two columns of values for X and Y, highlight those for a scatter plot and select aggregate values on the X-axis. So then if a row has the same X as another row then it can aggregate those values as min, max, mean, median, sum, count. You'd THINK that for that set up then stddev for error bars could do the stddev of all the rows with the same X. But no, it doesn't work like that - it is still series based. So you still need to turn each X-Y point into its own series.

[@PeterStanley]

I fully agree with you. It would be nice if Sheets would have picked the brain of the excel folks and adapted their software to make this a one click feature. In the end it's not too bad for the kinds of graphs my students in grade 11 and 12 are working with but I'd have to have larger data sets and try to pull this off. -Thanks for the comment and thoughts on this.

[@robinsekhon3140]

thanks yo this saved my bio grade

[@mrfrag718]

Thank you so much

[@louperrais7211]

Hello, this video was really great. Do you know how to do the same thing with a graph that has multiple lines ?

[@PeterStanley]

Sorry for such a late reply but this might help someone out there... I've done this for MS Excel but haven't done it yet with google sheets. If that helps anyone, here is the link: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fanUe4R_as91kNk

[@czeliot]

The values you've inputted were values of standard deviation. Why did you click constant? Thanks for making our to separate the series clearer, by the way!

[@AnonymousNorm]

Thanks bro 👍

[@brarian]

Thank you

[@aaronmcgowan5444]

This is a nice workaround for five data points. But how would you deal with 1,000 data points? Or the need to have asymmetrical error bars, with a different + and - value? It's sad that Google hasn't done anything about this for years.

[@PeterStanley]

totally agree with you this √

[@martinkramarcik5368]

Why we do have to insert STD manually? I really don't understand why I cant mark a cells with STD, like in excel.

[@maldihno]

ty

[@charliecaiki3289]

manually?

[@vitlokssylt]

So what you're saying is basically "use Excel". It's good to know that it's technically possible and it's a good explanation, but this method is simply not sustainable for large sets of data.

[@PeterStanley]

I definitely agree with you and hope the techs at google keep making these much needed improvements.

[@LilliHerveau]

thanks for the tuto! this system is garbage :( there should be an option to apply error bar to a serie given another serie

[@PeterStanley]

Agreed that it should be a lot easier. Hopefully one day soon my video will be redundant.

[@user-pe6ij5ip6s]

You can’t customize error bars on excel

[@PeterStanley]

This (kzbin.info/www/bejne/eF7dfJaJpL6Ap5I ) is an older version of excel I used to work with (pre google sheets) and I thought it was quite a bit easier for this type of task. Might be what you are looking for.

[@alecjolley8555]

Thank you!