Plotting the Electric Potential in Excel

• The result should look like that plot shown below. Save and print this graph.
• If you choose not to print the graphs and want to move them to Word, you may find that copying and pasting the graph into Word tends to freeze the computers. Instead you can hit the PrintScreen button on the keyboard on the upper right which makes a picture of the entire screen and places it on the clipboard, or you can hit Alt-PrintScreen which will places a picture only of the highlighted item on the clipboard. Then you can paste this screen capture into Word. Finally in Word if you select the screen capture and click on the Picture Tools/Format tab, then you can find the crop tool (probably) on the upper right, which will allow you to select only the portion of the screen capture that you want.
• The position along the z axis, the height, represents the size of the electric potential at the point r=(x,y).
• If a positively charged test particle were introduced into this system, it would behave somewhat like a particle placed on a mountain shaped like the figure below. It would slide down the mountain, its acceleration related to the steepness of the slope.

Note that the volcano-like shape is cut off at ten not because that is what the electric potential is really like but because that's where we told Excel to stop drawing it.

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