Hello and welcome to a video on making histograms in Excel. Today we'll be going over two different
ways you can make a histogram in Excel and we'll be using the data from our class data set that we've already
made. So today let's make a histogram
of DV and the first method that I'm going to show you for making a histogram involves selecting all
of your data and then
I'm going to scroll back up to the top so that my histogram appears near the top of our assignment.
Hit insert. Select the histogram or insert statistics
chart button and there will be a histogram option underneath it. You want the first one.
Okay. That is a histogram. We're going to call this example
A. Now there are a couple things we can do with our histogram to customize it.
We go to chart design. We can see we have the same options that we did for our
box and whisker plot where we can change the data that we use, change the chart type,
change the way the chart looks.
Let's stick with the classic for now. We can change the colors on our chart.
Let's go for this red.
We can also add elements like axis titles. Let's go ahead and add
a vertical and horizontal axis title. We can add data labels if we
want to.
In this case, let's put them at the inside on the end.
We could have grid lines if we wanted. Let's
go for no grid lines.
There we go. If you hit more options, it will give you
more grid line options that open up your whole grid line option bar. So, we could have solid lines, gradient
lines, automatic, which is just solid. In this case, we want no lines.
We could also have a legend, which tells us what the variable is that we're making a histogram for.
We're going to go with them. Because in this case, we're going to make our
chart title, histogram
of DV. Okay. Now, if we wanted
to change the number of bins, we could do that here on our x-axis.
There are numbers that tell us what the bins are. And what number between what
number they go to. If we right-click on that
and click format x-axis, then we'll get x-axis options, including
number of bins. So if we have a specific number of bins that we need to have, say 12,
then we can now have 12 bins on our histogram.
Let's change it back to the automatic.
There is a second way to make a histogram. And this involves using the data analysis tool pack.
If you don't have the data analysis tool pack installed, please see the video specifically for installing that data analysis
tool pack. But once you have it, you'll go to data, click data analysis.
This might be taking a moment to load. There we go. Histogram,
you may have to scroll down a little bit for it, but it'll be right here. Click OK.
And now I've already got some data selected from our previous
project I was working on. So I'm going to go ahead and select DV because we want the same histogram. Again,
for our example, I'm going to click
Labels because I have included the Label DV.
Our output range will be right here.
We're going to select Chart Output because we want a chart when we output our histogram. Otherwise,
we won't get an image of our histogram.
There we go. Now you can see it's created a set of bins for
us for DV. And it's given us this small chart.
The first thing I like to do is go ahead and make this chart a little bigger.
And now, one of the main differences between histograms and bar charts is that bar charts have spaces
and histograms do not. So we want to fix this. So that there's no spaces in
between our bars. To do that, you click on series options, go to gap
width and set that to zero. And now we have a histogram with no
spaces between the bars. Perfect.
We can see the shape of our distribution very nicely in both of them.
You can also change your title,
your labels,
and you can change colors if you want to.
So long as your histogram is able to be viewed and you can see the shape of the distribution,
then it will be fine. We also need to make sure that we have titles, axis labels,
and enough bins that we can see the shape of the distribution, or the number of bins that we've asked for in your assignment.
Okay, good luck and have fun using Excel!