Graphs-+Histograms

=Construct a Histogram in Microsoft Excel 2007= Article by [|Michele McDonough]

Column Charts and Histograms Histograms can be constructed in Microsoft Excel with the **Column Chart** tool. You do have to make some modifications to the column chart to make it look like a histogram, and we’ll cover the steps needed to do that in this guide. For this tutorial, we’ll be working with the example discussed in earlier parts of this series. Also, if you would like to download the Excel file that contains all of the data, tables, and charts used in this series, you can find it in the Windows Platform Media Gallery.

Creating the Histogram
In the steps that follow, we’ll construct a histogram from the table of data created in Part 2 of this series.
 * Step 1:** Select the columns with information pertaining to the **Upper Limit of the Interval** and **Frequency**.


 * Step 2:** From the **Insert** tab on the Excel ribbon, click on the down arrow under **Column** in the **Charts** section. Select the first 2-D column chart.

The chart will look like that in the screenshot below. Don’t worry about the fact that it doesn’t look like a histogram quite yet – we still have a few modifications to make.


 * Step 3:** Right-click anywhere on the chart and choose the **Select Data** option.


 * Step 4:** In the **Select Data Source** window that appears, first click on the **Edit** button located in the **Horizontal (Category) Axis Labels** section.

A new dialog box entitled **Axis Labels** will pop up. Enter the cells that contain the data for **Upper Limit of Interval**. You can either type this information in manually or use the mouse to select the related cells.

When finished, click **OK** to return to the **Select Data Source** window.
 * //Note://** //Don’t include the column header in this range – only select the cells that contain numerical data.//
 * Step 5:** In the **Legend Entries (Series)** section of the **Select Data Source** window, click on **Upper Limit of Interval** to highlight the selection and then click the **Remove** button.

Click **OK** to exit this window. Now our chart is starting to actually look like a histogram.

In fact, it looks enough like a histogram that we could stop here if we wanted. However, it would be nice to do some additional formatting to the chart to pretty it up a bit and give it a more professional appearance.

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