Creating a Histogram

You can do that in Excel through the following steps (this is for PC; for a Mac, this is a good resource):

  1. Highlight the data you want to look at
  2. Click “Insert”
  3. Click the button with blue bars to the right of the icon for a line graph.
  4. Select the histogram.
  5. You might (probably) will get a histogram that is hard to read or make sense of, because Excel automatically groups numbers together. If so, check out below steps.
  6. Adjust the bins by clicking on the x-axis and then right-click to click “format axis.” “Bins” are the ranges of values for each bar in the histogram.
  7. Once you click on the bins and format axis, go to “axis options.” I recommend changing the “bin width” to a range that seems useful to look at (e.g., for Airbnb data set for price per night, you might do 30 or 50–so, one axis item would be 0-30, the next would be 31-60, and so on).
  8. I would also recommend checking “overflow bin” to a maximum value and the “underflow bin” to a minimum value to limit how many items are on the x-axis. This will count all values together at that maximum value and beyond (e.g., for Airbnb data set, I did 500–so the last item would be for all listings that were $500 or more per night) and the minimum value and less (e.g., for same data set, I did 30–so the first item would be for all listings that were $30 or less per night).
  9. Once you set that up, you can now look at what the distribution looks like to see if it is approximately normal, skewed, uniform, or bimodal–and, thus, what would be an appropriate way to measure for central tendency.

If you prefer a video, go here for (essentially) the same instructions:

How To Create A Histogram in Excel (& change the bin size) – YouTube

 

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