Page 133 - Lean six sigma demystified

112 Lean Six Sigma DemystifieD

follow these rules when inputting your data. Make sure you only select
one row and one column of labels. Otherwise the QI Macros will try to
treat each additional row as numbers.

People often put headings for a single column into multiple cells. If you put
the heading in a single cell, right click on that cell, choose Format—Cells,
click on Alignment, and click the Wrap Text button; Excel will word wrap the
text for you.

• Labels should be formatted as text. If your labels are numbers (e.g., 1, 2, 3)
you need to make them text so that Excel doesn’t treat them as part of
your data. To do this, you will need to put text in front of them. Some
examples are Sample1, S1, Lot1, and L1. If you just want the 1 to show,
then you will need to put an apostrophe in front of each number to change
it from data to text (e.g., ’1, ’2, ’3, etc.)
• Data should be formatted as numbers. Your data must be numeric AND
formatted as a number for the macros to perform the necessary calcula-
tions. If you have data that are left justified or look like 001, 002, 003,
then it is formatted as text and the QI Macros will attempt to convert it
to numbers before graphing it.

tiP Data exported from Microsoft Access is often in text format. To change it to
numeric, (1) import the data to Excel, (2) put the number 1 in a blank cell,
(3) Edit-Copy the cell with the 1 in it, (4) select the imported text data, and
(5) choose Edit-Paste Special/Multiply to multiply every imported cell by
1 which will convert them to numeric data.

• Select the right number of columns. Each chart requires a certain number of
columns of data to run properly. They are
One column: Pareto, pie, c chart, np chart, XmR chart

One or more columns: line, run, bar, histogram
Two columns: scatter chart, u chart, p chart
Two or more columns: nox & whisker chart, dot plot, multivari, histogram,
XbarR and XbarS

• Beware of hidden rows or columns. If you select columns A:F, but B and C
are hidden, the QI Macros will use all five columns including the hidden
ones. To select nonadjacent columns, use the control key.