Here's what I ended up with, after setting my bin width to one year. To edit your bin values settings, you need to double-click the x-axis text underneath the histogram. What matters is that you're happy that you get an idea of the shape of the distribution. There's really no right or wrong way to decide what bin width or number of bins to show. This should ensure that each column represents an equal amount of points on the scale you're using if you set the bin width.Īlternatively, you can specify the number of bins and then the bin width will be set to the total range divided by the number of bins. 'Binning' is the grouping of like values together into columns in the histogram. Excel will select the best options for the data at hand in terms of binning.

This will immediately create a histogram out of the selected data. I'll select the column for 'Males' on my spreadsheet (yes, the entire column!), and then go to Insert > Charts > Histogram. The values used here are the average ages for each country reported in the source data, between the years 19. Rather than go for the morbid option and looking at age at death, how about we look at the average age of people in different countries when they enter into their first marriage? For each country, the data will have an age value, in this case split by male and female, like so:įor some countries, there's no data, so in the final data set, we'll have data for 194 countries for males, and 196 countries for females. The first thing that sprung to mind when thinking about data collected on a scale is data concerning people's ages. These constitute a fairly traditional way of displaying the shape of the distribution of your data and are often used as the foundation for more advanced statistical analysis, such as working out medians, averages, and standard deviations.Īlternatively, you can easily create a histogram for free using Displayr’s histogram maker.

Any data that's been collected on a numeric scale or as a continuous measurement can be represented as a histogram.

Constructing a histogram in excel