Need Excel Help Creating Non-Numerical Histogram

[sivalleycubfan]

Hi all,

I'm certainly not an advanced Excel user, but I thought I could figure out this problem on my own. But after struggling with it for a while, I'm getting frustrated. Here's what I want to do.

I want to create a histogram (or bar graph) that counts the number of occurrences of each of a given number of non-numerical entries. For instance, let's say I have a pair of columns that looks like the one below, where I'm using commas to indicate different fields in the spreadsheet:

red, apple
blue, blueberry
green, grape
red, onion
red, strawberry
green, pear

Now, I want to have a chart that counts up the occurrences of red, blue, and green, and shows me the numbers (so in this case it would have a bar labeled "red" with a value of 3, a bar for "green" with a value of 2, and a bar for "blue" with a value of 1). I can make a histogram if I assign a numerical value to red, blue, and green, and use the frequency function. But in this application, I really want to make the "buckets" strings, as opposed to numbers.

This seems like it should be easy, but I'm lost. Help! Thanks in advance!

SiValleyCubFan

 

[sivalleycubfan]

Okay, next question

Hi all,

Okay, thanks to others on this forum...in reading some other postings going back a few weeks, I discovered the "COUNTIF" function, which I'd never heard of before. Using that I can now count up the occurrences of each type and get numerical values, which can in turn be charted. Not quite as slick as what I was hoping for, but it gets the job done nonetheless. Very cool.

Okay, next question. I have created a drop-down box and set up the categories of things that can be selected in that cell. Continuing the previous example, red, green, and blue are all selected via drop-down box options. However, my reference cells for the drop-down box options have text formatting (the "red" text is colored red, and so on).

How do I get the text formatting to carry over from the source cell to the cell with the drop-down box?

Thanks in advance, and thanks for a cool forum. I'm learning a lot just by browsing entries.

SiValleyCubFan