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13.5.1 Drawing the Graph

To draw a histogram:

  1. Start a new spreadsheet, saving the bar graph spreadsheet as bars.

  2. Enter the following data on used car prices into a spreadsheet:

    A B C D
    1 5640 4125 4183 3741
    2 4557 4878 6251 5465
    3 5294 4817 4759 5526
    4 6739 5302 3739 5048
    5 5172 6842 5604 4963
    6 4438 4721 3886 4587
    7 3410 4987 4206 5109
    8 3878 6177 4118 5905
    9 5003 6182 3462 5550
    10 4485 5634 2873 4426

  3. Select the range A1..D10. The columns of numbers should now be highlighted.

  4. Select New Graph from the Graph menu and display its submenu.

  5. Select Histogram from the New Graph submenu. NExS will bring up a window containing what looks like a bar graph. In Figure 13.9 you can see that there are ten bars over the interval from 2873 to 6842 and they have heights from 1 to 8. This graph shows the number of used cars that sell in a given price range. Notice that cars selling for $3,000 or $6,000 are rare, but prices between $4,000 and $5,000 are common.

Although the Histogram looks like a bar graph, it is not a bar graph. To create a bar graph, you need to give both X and Y coordinates to specify the position and height of each bar.

With histograms, you supply only the X range which can be a single row, single column, or block of data. NExS examines the data and determines the maximum and minimum values. Then it divides the data between the maximum and minimum into equal-sized bins and counts how many of the data values fall into each bin. The histogram is then made by drawing bars centered within each bin and having a height equal to the number of data values in each bin.

   figure4875
Figure 13.9: Histogram 1


next up previous contents index
Next: 13.5.2 Setting Maximum and Up: 13.5 Making Histograms Previous: 13.5 Making Histograms

NExS User's Guide, Version 1.4.5
Grey Trout Software
11 April 1999