Increasing the bin width often decreases the number of total bins in the histogram and leads to fatter and fewer bins.This decreases the width of each bin and increases the total number of bins in the histogram.įeel free to modify the bin width to any value you’d like and keep in mind the following rules of thumb: We could also decrease the bin width to 10,000: Notice how this increases the width of each bin and reduces the total number of bins. We can change this to any number we’d like.įor example, we could increase the bin width to 50,000: In the window that appears to the right, we can see that Excel chose the bin width to be 29,000.
To adjust the bin width, right click the horizontal axis on the histogram and then click Format Axis from the dropdown: This creates the following histogram by default: Then we’ll click the INSERT tab along the top ribbon, then we’ll click the Histogram icon within the Charts section. Next, we’ll highlight the two columns of data: Step 1: Create the Dataįirst, we’ll create the following dataset that shows the annual income of 26 different people: This tutorial provides a step-by-step example of how to create a histogram in Excel and how to modify the bin width so that the histogram looks exactly how you’d like. A histogram is a plot that can be used to quickly visualize the distribution of values in a dataset.
