From the course: Learning Excel: Data Analysis

Group data using histograms - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Learning Excel: Data Analysis

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Group data using histograms

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- [Instructor] Charts and graphs let you summarize your data visually. In this movie, I will discuss and demonstrate how to create a specialized chart called a histogram. A histogram is a column chart that indicates the number of values that fall into a number of bins or value ranges. You can control the size of the bins and also the number, and you are able to select the bin count and size that works best for your data. Now let's switch over to Excel and I will show you how to create histograms in that program. My sample file is 02_01_Histogram, and you can find it in the Chapter Two folder of the Exercise Files collection. In column A, I have 50 values that I generated randomly that show hourly demand for a particular company. So you can see it starts in cell A1, and if I scroll down, it ends and cell A51. To create a histogram like I showed you in the introduction, click any cell in your dataset and then on the insert tab of the ribbon. Go to the charts area, click the insert statistic chart icon, and in the top group, click histogram on the left, and you can see that the histogram chart has been created. Excel decided based on its internal algorithm to create five bins, and you can see the counts. Between 40 and 60, we have two values, between 64 and 88, there are 15, 16 between 88 and 112, 12 between 112 and 136, and it looks like we also have five between 136 and 160. If you want to edit the title, for example, you can go up and click the title, select the text, and I'll call it Hourly Demand and click away, and I have edited the title of my histogram. Another way to edit a histogram is to change the size of the bins or their number. To do that, you want to right click value on the horizontal or x-axis. So I'll go down, and when I have a tool tip that says horizontal axis, I will right click, and then click format axis. The format axis task pane appears, and under axis options, you see that I can select either bin width or number of bins. I'll start with bin width. It's currently set to 24, and let's say that I want to make my bins half that size or 12, so I will change the value, and I can make it a decimal if I want, but in this case, I'll just stay with 12, and press enter, and there you see my bins and the data distribution takes on a little bit more detail. You can see that I have one value between 40 and 52 and a single value also between 52 and 64 instead of having two values between 40 and 64, so it's a little more detailed. If you want to change the number of bins, then you can go back over to the format, axis, task pane, select that radio button, and let's say that I want to have eight bins. So instead of 10, or five like I had at the start, I'll type eight, press enter, and there I have my bins, and you can see here that I have my decimal values and if I drag the histogram chart, then I get the values written horizontally, although still offset a little because the chart isn't quite wide enough to fit all the values straight across. Using histograms is a great way to look at the distribution of your data. If you care about values that fall within certain ranges, histograms are a great way to go.

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