I would also edit the color selection (I really, REALLY don't like orange, but I'm a total sucker for clichés) and the font color of the age scale y-axis to make it easier to read.įinally, I would select the x-axis on the chart to alter the number format.
This will update both the "Males" and "Females" to look more like actual histograms.
First, in the chart, select the series for men (click one of the blue bars), and then in the Format Data Series > Series Options menu, change the Gap Width to 0. There's a few things we can do to make this more readable and more like two histograms. Doing so will give me a chart that looks like this: With all my data selected, I click Insert > Chart > Stacked Bar. 03 will just clutter up my final chart), and the two columns with counts for "Males" and "Females" before selecting my chart type. I'll need to select both the scale points (after reducing the decimals down to none: the. I'm doing this as I want them to appear on the left of my comparative chart. Next, I'm going to multiply my "Male" values by -1. You can see in the formula bar that I used a formula to count the number of cases in each age range. I can use a formula for this too, so when I'm done, I will end up with a table like this: Here are my maximum and minimum values:īecause my lowest value is 17.03, I'll start by counting the number of cases I have in the range of one year from 17.03 to 18.03, and so on, until I've reached the age of 36.03, which is my maximum. In my case my "Male" data is in column C, and my "Female" data is in column D. We do this by using Excel's built in formulas =MAX() and =MIN(). First, we should work out the maximum and minimum values for males and females so that we can establish the end-points of the x-axis in our chart. To achieve this, we have to manually aggregate our data, and then chart it as a bar chart. There's unfortunately no immediate way of creating a single histogram that includes both the distributions for males as well as the distribution for females all in one go. Either way, investigating this data further would be necessary to draw any specific conclusions. Perhaps there's a difference between developed countries vs. At this stage we can only guess at why that may be. It looks like there may be two distinct sub-samples among females. This suggests that there's something more going on here than you would expect. The female distribution (adjusted to show one bin for each year/scale point in the data) appears bimodal. The histogram for females, however, reveals an interesting pattern: There's an unexpected dip here among males aged in their late 20:s and early 30:s. Otherwise the histogram reveals no surprises and shows a slight positive skew to younger ages. 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.