This is difficult to answer without a clear example of your cell data.
I presume you have a cell which contains strings, and numbers associated with these strings, and you want to plot a histogram (<http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/histogram.html> -> see histogram with properties). In the documentaion it should be clear how to do it when you have transformed your data to required form.
On the latter, you can extract cell contents using curly braces. For example:
%make a cell array with mixed contents
cell_1 = {1,'aa',3}
%using normal braces returns a cell
cell_1(1)
%using curly bracers returns the "content" of the cell
cell_1{1}
If you are still unclear about how to manipulate data types in your case, you can post an example of your cell so i can improve my answer.
Kind regards, Damjan
