Living. That’s what I’ve been busy with. But I think I’m going to share a tidbit of knowledge to the poor kids out there who either aren’t smart enough to pirate a copy of Minitab or aren’t fortunate enough to drop \$1500 on statistical analysis software. I’m going to show you how to do binning with Excel (and potentially LibreOffice / OpenOffice).

Excel binning is the easiest. It’s also a great deal more flexible than Minitab.

First, you have to highlight a range of cells that you wish to turn into a histogram. Lets say A1:A5 is your series of bin values. We could easily say:

A
12:00
13:00
14:00
15:00
16:00

Is your table for binning. Now if you select B1:B5 and press F2, you can type in =FREQUENCY(DataRange,A1:A5) and then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. You’ll end up with:

A B
12:00 0
13:00 13
14:00 28
15:00 8
16:00 32

And it will depend on the data you select, what you’ll end up seeing as a histogram.

This actually is a great way to analyze information collected with my prior script located at this url.

Don’t forget, you’re going to need a range of data to process for DataRange. A most likely candidate would be something like:

D
12:31
12:45
12:51
12:51
etc.

Excel’s “Frequency” function just counts the number of matches between bins, which it will also do with time or date data as applicable, especially in the aforementioned “tweet time histogram” blog post. Good stuff.

Have fun processing data!

Oh. Yeah, I guess I could try to figure the LibreOffice/OpenOffice equivalents out, but I think I’ll leave that to you.

Get to it, infosec freak! Remember, you have to SELECT THE RANGE you wish to propagate with histogram data FIRST, then you have to press F2 and enter the formula as I stated earlier. Shit is important, otherwise it won’t work. So yeah. “Teach a man to fish” and all that.