Histogram is a powerful data analysis technique — it let’s you quickly see the distribution of the data you have. So in this post, I am going to list the steps to create histogram in Excel.
It’s a two-step process.
- Install “Data Analysis Tool Pak” (free Excel add-in)
- Format the data and build the histogram
Step 1: Install Data Analysis Tool Pak.
One of the most useful data analysis add-in in excel is not available by default! It’s called “Analysis ToolPak”
To activate it. Go to File > Excel options > Addins > For the manage field, select Excel add-ins
Make sure that ToolPak is activated and click OK.
(Also, Solver is a great add-in as well! It’s not in the scope of this article to discuss that add-in but it’s a powerful add-in as well. For instance, it let’s you work on optimization problems)
Step 2: Format Data and build the Histogram
So now let’s format the data.
You need two things to create a Histogram. 1) Data 2) Range
Here’s an example: (I have about 3000 numbers and need to see the distribution)
You could have other fields on the sheet as well but you need at least the data field. Range is optional but I recommend that you specify the Range so that your histogram would have the bins that you specified — otherwise you could have just used a bar chart!
Note that both of them are numerical.
Now go to Menu Bar > Data > Data Analysis
Out of the options available, click on Histogram and select the Input Range and Bin Range > after you’re done, click OK.
You should see a new worksheet with raw data (ready for charting!). Now, create a Bar chart using the raw data and you have your histogram:
Conclusion:
In this post I listed the steps you can take to create a Histogram in Excel. Note that there are other options as well — like R (hist function) that let’s you build histogram as well so you do have choice of tools but if you want to stick with excel and it’s good enough then you now know how. Cheers!
Related Post: What is the difference between Histogram & Bar Chart?
