The Histogram tool creates individual and cumulative frequencies for a range of cells and specified number of bins.  A histogram uses bars (or rectangles) of different heights to display the frequency, or number of records, in the population. 

The example below contains sales of Mark's Milk Chocolate Bars for the month of January for a small candy shop.

Histogram Example Dataset

To create a histogram:

  1. On the XLMiner Analysis ToolPak pane, click Histogram
  2. Enter B1:B32 for "Input Range". 
  3. Enter C1:C6 for "Bin Range".  This range includes the upper bound of five (n) data "bins" or categories.  Six bins (or n + 1) will appear in the histogram:  0-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, 21-25, and More.  Any records with values greater than 25 will be placed in the More bin. 
  4. Keep "Labels" selected since the first row contains labels describing the contents of each column. 
  5. Enter E1 for "Output Range".
  6. Select "Pareto" to add a column listing the frequency values from greatest to least and the cumulative percentages of observations assigned to each bin. 
  7. Select "Cumulative Percentage" to add a column that computes the cumulative number of observations and related percentages for each bin.   
  8. Select "Chart Output" to display the Histogram. Click OK. 

Histogram Pane

The results are below. 

Histogram Results

In this example, 2 observations were assigned to the 0-5 bin, 16 assigned to the 6-10 bin, 6 assigned to the 11-15 bin, 5 observations to the 16-20 bin and 2 observations to the 21-25 bin.