Histograms in a spreadsheet?

[asterroc]

I want to do a histogram - that is a count of frequency of reply - in some sort of spreadsheet program. I want to be able to input each person's responses (for example, from a survey) and have it tally up the number of responses for me. As I understand it, Excel cannot do this, I'd have to tell it how many people gave each reply. Anyone know of another (free) program that can do this for me, or will I have to relearn C++ and find a compiler, or just do it by hand since there's "only" going to be 68 people?

ETA: I've been told that Access can do this, so I'm goign to play with that. And with Excel according to what kadath says.

ETAA: In MS Excel, go to the Tools menu and Data Analysis... If yours doesn't have that menu, first click "Add-Ins..." to install it (no CD required). Use the Help dialogue to figure out how to install it and use it.

Comments

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Excel can do that. You have to get into its built-in logical functions, but it has that capability.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Hm. I was wondering whether there was a built-in macro or something. Do you mean I'm going to have to do something tedious like write conditional equations, or is there a simple function named histogram or something?

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Tools -> Add-Ins. Choose Analysis ToolPak.

Once this is installed, you can generate a histogram with Tools -> Data Analysis. Choose "Histogram" from the options in the box.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I found it on my own in the same amount of time. Thanks so much! The format is messy, but it's a good thing to have. Now I'll have to figure out if it can do text entries rather than just numbers, but no worries, I can always assign an arbitrary number to any set text. Awesome.

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you can do this in Excel. My tendency would be to do it in Matlab, because I'm comfortable working with it and I find it more powerfully customizable than Excel for plotting things. But don't bother with that if you don't know Matlab. It's not a big enough thing to be worth learning Matlab over.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I have known Matlab in the past. I haven't used it in years, and I don't have access to it at this time.

kadath helped me figure it out in Excel.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

R is a good freeware statistics package. I use it for class.

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

You're better off doing it in Excel, but in case you ever have need to do matlabish stuff, Octave is out there and free and mostly compatible with Matlab, and I'm pretty sure you can make it work on a Mac.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Actually, best_ken_ever just helped me do some really awesome stuff to it just now, and I've not only proved what I thought was the case, I also learned something more. :) Mayhaps I'll post it later.