How to make a quick-n-dirty histogram Posted By Adam Reilly on August 19, 2009
Most people know that Microsoft excel has the capability to produce a wide variety of charts in order visualize data. However, if you find yourself needing to summarize more rows than excel can load or you need to use SQL to provide more flexible data manipulation, Microsoft Access also provides a function called “pivot charts” which allows users to generate quick visual summary of queries.
We’ll start by importing a sample set of data which was obtained from the Internet. The data is in the form of Comma Separated Values, or CSV which is a common data interchange format.
Once the data is imported into it’s own table, we’ll create a new query in design view. This is a key step, as pivot charts are designed to visualize data from queries.
- We’ll add the table
- Select some columns that we’d like to summarize
- And be sure that the ‘Group By’ feature is turned on
- Let’s assume we want to know which position played in the most games for this data set
- Finally, we’ll preview the query
Now that our query is created, we’ll save it with a sensible name.
In order to display this data, we’ll need to select the view menu and select ‘Pivot Chart view’
The Chart field list appears with the fields from our query. Clicking the drop down at the bottom of the field palate shows the different areas of the chart where data can be added. Since we want to know how many games each position played, we’ll add Position to categories and sum of games played to the data area. We can easily see from this summary that the outfielders played more games than any other position.
There is a wide array of chart types to choose from and these reports can be included in reports or other office documents to add impact. It’s a quick and easy way to add visualization to data-based summaries.
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