How to Use the Excel Descriptive Statistics tool

Following on from my How to Calculate Standard Deviation I have been asked to extend and expand my Math related Hubs since visitors find them easy to follow. This hub focuses on How to Use the Excel Descriptive Statistics tool. I am still using Excel 2003 since I find the ribbon very irritating but the commands are still the same or very close.

Step 1 start off with a series of numbers in an excel sheet row

Highlight the numbers

Click on Tools the Data Analysis
(if Data Analysis is not there click on Add-in and say Ok to add AnalysisToolPack)

When you select data analysis the box will open, scroll down and select Descriptive Statistics... press Ok

The Descriptive Statistics dialog box will open

This box has two important things
The Input
At the top of this box you can click on the little red arrow if your input range is different, or select if it is in columns instead of rows and if the first row contains the labels... experiment with this, just start over again if you select the wrong thing..

The Output
The Output range is where Excel is going to put the answers, so you can have it on this sheet, on a new sheet, in a new workbook..

Always remember context help in Excel, when you have this Descriptive Statistics box open click on help and specific help for this box choices will open..

Assuming you have not much experience in using this tool just pick a cell in clear space on your sheet for the output and select all the other options and select Ok.

Using the data or list of numbers you selected Excel will produce the analysis below, as you can see it has calculated the Mean and the Standard Deviation and a range of other things.

Ok so imagine another example with a range of data

Same procedure - The Input, at the top of this box you can click on the little red arrow for this different input range, or again select if it is in columns instead of rows and if the first row contains the labels... experiment with this, just start over again if you select the wrong thing..

The Output
The Output range is where Excel is going to put the answers, so you can have it on this sheet, on a new sheet, in a new workbook..

Ok so the dialog box should look like this !!

So the table of descriptive statistics will look like this, it has loads of analysis of the numbers... I will come back to this Hub and add more but for now go and do some real homework... :-)

So each of these measurements can be analysed and thought about and talked about depending upon what you want to know or discover from the data

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