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Excel For Mac Relative Frequency Histogram

The Importance of Histograms and Descriptive Statistics

To create a frequency distribution and a histogram, follow these steps: Click the Data tab’s Data Analysis command button to tell Excel that you want to create a frequency distribution and a histogram. When Excel displays the Data Analysis dialog box, select Histogram from the Analysis Tools list and click OK. In this video you can follow step by step instructions to add a histogram and frequency polygon to your EXCEL spreadsheet on a MAC.Thanks to Justin for creat. To create histogram with relative frequency, please follow the steps below: Active the column with data, select Statistics: Descriptive Statistics: Frequency Counts to open the dialog. Check on Relative Frequency checkbox in Quantities to Compute branch, click OK to apply, a new sheet (FreqCounts1) with results will be created. Make Histogram Using Data Analysis ToolPak To create a histogram in Excel 2016/2013/2010 for Mac and Windows, follow these simple steps: Go to the Data tab and click on Data Analysis. Select Histogram in Data Analysis ToolPak Menu Dialog and hit the OK button. Making a histogram using excel for mac Here's the jest of the assignment I have to do. I have to take the salaries of all the employees of a company and create a histogram using pay bin ranges of 50 thousand (0-49, 50-99, 100-149, 150-199, etc).

The word “statistics” comes from the German word “stadt”. Stadt means “city” but in the 18th century each city was a state in its own right. And the people who ran those states needed to have the facts. What is the population? What is the food production? How many men are available for the military? What is the birth rate? Information about the state came to be known as Statistics. In today’s complex world people do data mining, gather big data, and perform tests of statistical hypotheses. It is easy to forget that one of the primary tasks of statistics is purely descriptive.

Calculating descriptive statistics such as mean, median, and variance is easy, since Excel has functions for this purpose. Let’s look at something a little more complicated but a necessary tool in the statistician’s toolbox, the frequency distribution and its graphical comrade, the histogram.

Creating a Histogram using Microsoft Excel

We’ll stick with the centuries-old tradition and gather some information about cities, starting with a table of income information about cities in the United States from the year 2009. We would like to observe the frequency distribution of median family incomes. The Excel data analysis toolpak has a nice dialog box for doing this automatically, but we’re going to take charge and do it ourselves using the FREQUENCY function.

Excel for mac relative frequency histogram calculator

We must first define the bins, which is to say the value ranges into which our data will be sorted. Generally this is done in a worksheet column, and Excel’s auto-fill feature makes this easy. In this example we will create bins from 10,000 to 170,0000 at increments of 5000.

Now we are ready to tabulate our frequency distribution. We highlight a second column next to our column of bin values. In the formula bar, we enter =FREQUENCY(. The first argument is the range containing our data. If you enter this range by highlighting it on the worksheet, be careful not to include the column heading. Only the data is highlighted. The second argument to FREQUENCY is the range containing the bin values. After entering the range in the formula bar close the parenthesis, but

Do not hit enter!
Highlight the range where the frequency results will appear and enter the frequency function.

Enter both the data ranges and the frequency bin range.

You’re almost ready but
Do not hit enter yet!

FREQUENCY if one of the many valuable Excel array functions. Mr. Excel calls them “CSE” functions, and this name is well chosen. The CSE acronym reminds us that you enter array functions not by hitting enter but by hitting <ctrl><shift><enter>. When you hit control-shift-enter, the formua will be entered in the highlighted cells. Note that in the formula bar, the function is now within curly braces. You cannot just type in these curly braces yourself. You must let Excel enter them after you type <ctrl><shift><enter>.

Now that we have our frequency distribution, it is impossible to resist creating a chart. The frequency range is already highlighted; we have only to click on “column chart” from Excel’s Insert ribbon tab. The chart looks OK, but we see that we will have to edit the horizontal axis label to reflect our frequency bins. We can right-click on the chart and choose “Select Data…” . Click the “Edit” button on the right-hand side, the side for the horizontal axis labels. Then enter the range containing the frequency bins.

Right-click the chart and choose “Select Data…” to edit the axis labels.

Right-click the chart and choose “Select Data…” to edit the axis labels.

After entering a title and choosing a style, we have our finished frequency histogram!

Histogram

I hope you enjoyed my first Excel post! Stay tuned for my next one where we cover Standard Deviations.


Frequency Distributions and Histograms

A frequency distribution is often used to group quantitative data. Data values are grouped into classes of equal widths. The smallest and largest observations in each class are called class limits, while class boundaries are individual values chosen to separate classes (often being the midpoints between upper and lower class limits of adjacent classes).

For example, the table below gives a frequency distribution for the following data:

Excel For Mac Relative Frequency Histogram Function

$$textrm{Data values: } 11, 13, 15, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 24, 25, 25, 25, 26, 28, 29, 29, 34$$$$begin{array}{c|c|c}textrm{Class Limits} & textrm{Class Boundaries} & textrm{Frequency}hline10 - 14 & 9.5 - 14.5 & 2hline15 - 19 & 14.5 - 19.5 & 3hline20 - 24 & 19.5 - 24.5 & 5hline25 - 29 & 24.5 - 29.5 & 7hline30 - 34 & 29.5 - 34.5 & 1hlineend{array}$$Frequency distributions should typically have between 5 and 20 classes, all of equal width; be mutually exclusive; continuous; and exhaustive.Frequency

One should use nice 'round' numbers for your class limits as long as there is not a compelling reason to avoid doing so. It will make your frequency distribution easier to read. For example, if your data starts with 43, 46, 48, 48, 52, 57, 58, ... you might pick a lower class limit of 40 and a class width of 5 (provided that a reasonable number of classes resulted)

A relative frequency distribution is very similar, except instead of reporting how many data values fall in a class, they report the fraction of data values that fall in a class. These are called relative frequencies and can be given as fractions, decimals, or percents.

A cumulative frequency distribution is another variant of a frequency distribution. Here, instead of reporting how many data values fall in some class, they report how many data values are contained in either that class or any class to its left.

The below table compares the values seen in a frequency distribution, a relative frequency distribution, and a cumulative frequency distribution, for the following sequence of dice rolls$$textrm{Dice Rolls: } 7, 6, 7, 6, 7, 4, 4, 6, 10, 5, 6, 11, 4, 8, 2, 9, 6, 5, 3, 8, 3, 3, 12, 9, 10, 7, 6, 7, 4, 6$$$$begin{array}{c|c|c}textrm{Class Limits} & textrm{Class Boundaries} & textrm{Frequency} & textrm{Relative Frequency} & textrm{Cumulative Frequency}hline2 - 3 & 1.5 - 3.5 & 4 & 2/15 & 4hline4 - 5 & 3.5 - 5.5 & 6 & 1/5 & 10 hline6 - 7 & 5.5 - 7.5 & 12 & 2/5 & 22hline8 - 9 & 7.5 - 9.5 & 4 & 2/15 & 26hline10 - 11 & 9.5 - 11.5 & 3 & 1/10 & 29hline12 - 13 & 11.5 - 13.5 & 1 & 1/30 & 30end{array}$$

A frequency histogram is a graphical version of a frequency distribution where the width and position of rectangles are used to indicate the various classes, with the heights of those rectangles indicating the frequency with which data fell into the associated class, as the example below suggests.

Frequency histograms should be labeled with either class boundaries (as shown below) or with class midpoints (in the middle of each rectangle).

Excel For Mac Relative Frequency Histogram Template

One can, of course, similarly construct relative frequency and cumulative frequency histograms.

The purpose of these graphs is to 'see' the distribution of the data. When using a calculator or software to plot histograms, experiment with different choices for boundaries, subject to the above restrictions, to find out which graphical properties (modality, skewness or symmetry, outliers, etc...) persist and which are just spurious effects of a particular choice of boundaries. Then use the boundaries that best reveal these persistant properites.

Probability Histograms

A type of graph closely related to a frequency histogram is a probability histogram, which shows the probabilities associated with a probability distribution in a similar way.

Here, we have a rectangle for each value a random variable can assume, where the height of the rectangle indicates the probability of getting that associated value.

Excel For Mac Relative Frequency Histogram Calculator

When the possible values the random variable can assume are consecutive integers, the left and right sides of the rectangles are taken to be the midpoints between these integers -- which forces them to all end in $0.5$. Additionally, the width of each rectangle is then $1$, which means that not only the height of the rectangle equals the probability of the corresponding value occurring, but the area of the rectangle does as well. (These observations become very important later when we apply a 'continuity correction' to approximate a discrete probability distribution with a continuous one.)