Excel: Histogram, Skewness and Kurtosis (Weather Example)

This video shows how to use Microsoft Excel to make a Histogram (a Statistical Chart). The example data comes from Weather Underground (wunderground.com). A histogram groups a set of data into bins and then plots the frequency of data points in each bin (y axis) versus the bin values (x axis). Excel allows one to select the bin width or alternatively the number of bins. The example data had an asymmetric tail, so we next introduced the concept of skewness and Excel's SKEW function. It is a measure of how a distribution deviates from a normal distribution (aka Gaussian distribution or Bell Curve). Another measure of difference from a normal distribution is kurtosis as determined by Excel's KURT function. Results might be characterized as leptokurtic, mesokurtic, or platykurtic. Finally we show that Excel's Analysis ToolPak Add-in has a Descriptive Statistic setting and within that Summary Statistics that provides many statistical measures.