How to Make a Histogram in Excel 2007

If Data Analysis does not appear on the Data ribbon in Excel, you’ll need to perform this one time
task.
Click the office icon to the left of the home ribbon.
At the bottom of the menu, click Excel option.
From the left list, choose Add-Ins. You’ll see a long list of active and inactive Add-Ins
At the very bottom, select the Manage Drop down box and then choose Excel Add-Ins,
Click Go.
Choose the Analysis ToolPak check box.
Click OK

1. Type the bin limits in a vertical column before accessing the Histogram feature. You might
want to start with ten bins. They should include most of the data and have easy to read cutoffs. You
can always adjust these and run the Histogram feature again. Too many bars or too few bars in
your final plot could be a problem.

2. Go to Data Analysis. A dialog box will open; select Histogram. You will see the following
dialog box.

Input Range is the location of the

data you want to put into bins.

Bin Range is the location of the

bin limits you typed in.

Don’t check Labels unless you

selected the labels in the two
ranges above.

Output Range is the top left

corner of where you would like
the results to appear.

The Histogram feature will only make a frequency histogram. If you want a relative frequency
histogram, you have to calculate the relative frequencies first and then make a graph.
Example: The enrollment credits for 50 students were recorded. Bins that corresponded to the number
of credits were appropriate here. The output from Histogram and resulting bar graph are shown below.

Enrollment credits for 50 students Bin Limits Output

8 9 12 9 9 Credits Bin Frequency
14 12 15 5 13 0 0 0
12 14 12 10 11 1 1 0
10 11 8 15 10 2 2 0
9 11 10 8 9 3 3 0
15 10 10 12 9 4 4 0
10 17 11 13 10 5 5 1
14 10 12 12 9 6 6 1
12 11 11 10 10 7 7 1
7 13 11 6 13 8 8 3
9 9 7
10 10 11
11 11 7
12 12 8
13 13 4
14 14 3
15 15 3
16 16 0
17 17 1
18 18 0
More 0

Frequency

12
Number of Students

10

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Number of Credits