132 Fundamentals of Statistics
To view the Housing workbook:1 Start Excel.
2 Open the Housing workbook from the Chapter04 folder.
The workbook appears as shown in Figure 4-1.Figure 4-1
The Housing
workbook3 Save the workbook as Housing Statistics.
Creating a Frequency Table
One of the fi rst things we’ll examine when studying this data set is the dis-
tribution of its values. The distribution is the spread of the data across a
range of possible values. If you were thinking about moving to Albuquerque
during the time these data were recorded, you might be interested in the
distribution of home prices in the area. What is the range of housing prices
in the area? What percentage of houses list for under $125,000?
As a fi rst step in answering these types of questions, we’ll create a fre-
quency table of the home prices. A frequency table is a table that tabulates
the number of occurrences or counts of a specifi c value of a given variable.
Excel does not have a built-in command to create such a frequency table,