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 todays 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.

Lets look at something a little more complicated but a necessary tool in the statisticians toolbox, the frequency distribution and its graphical comrade, the histogram.

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 were going to take charge and do it ourselves using the FREQUENCY function.

Generally this is done in a worksheet column, and Excels auto-fill feature makes this easy.

We highlight a second column next to our column of bin values.

If you enter this range by highlighting it on the worksheet, be careful not to include the column heading.

The second argument to FREQUENCY is the range containing the bin values.

After entering the range in the formula bar close the parenthesis, but.

The first defines the range that contains the data; the second defines the range that contains the boundary values for our histogram bins.

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.

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.

The frequency range is already highlighted; we have only to click on column chart from Excels 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.

Click the Edit button on the right-hand side, the side for the horizontal axis labels.

Histogram Excel For Mac 2011