When you have data where the categories are ordered, you can calculate their cumulative frequency. Ordered means that the categories have a natural sorting. An example of this would be integers, which are in number order. Another example would be letter grades—A, B, C, D, and F.
Below you’ll learn how to make a cumulative frequency table in Excel
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Excel
Instruction
Example 1
Cumulative Frequency Table
Below you see a frequency table of the grade distribution within a school class.
Make a relative frequency table of the grade distribution.
It’s certainly useful to know how many students received a grade of B in a class. This is the frequency of the category for “Grade B”. It can also be interesting to know how many students who got a B or a higher grade. You can determine this by using the cumulative frequency.
You’ll now see how to make a table with a cumulative frequency for the table above.
C2
. In this cell it should show how many students received the grade A or higher. Since there is no higher grade, you only need to count the number of students who received an A. So write: =B2
Now you’ll make a formula that calculates how many got the grade B or higher. You’ll do this by adding the number of students who received a B to the previous cumulative frequency—the students who received an A or higher.
In cell C3
, write
=B3+C2
Then highlight cell C3
and copy the formula down to cell C6
. The table looks like this:
Here are the formulas for each cell:
Here are the formulas for each cell: