[…] Ogives are not used much by professional statisticians because modern computers make it easy to compute and visualize the exact empirical cumulative distribution function (ECDF). However, if you are a student learning to analyze data by hand, an ogive is an easy way to approximate the ECDF from binned data. They are also important if you do not have access to the original data, but you have a histogram that appeared in a published report. (See "How to approximate a distribution from published quantiles.") …