Monday, November 11, 2013

How To... Display a Range of Descriptive Statistics in Excel 2010

Over the past year since we developed and started the new Higher Diploma in Data Analytics at the National College of Ireland I have been in many discussions about what is the best tool to use when analysing data, especially "Big Data". Some say the R or Python programming languages, others say SAS Software or IBM's SPSS, and I know there are many other tools available as well. One common theme though is that many people still ask "Can I get that in Excel?". It's still probably the most popular tool for analysing data and of course it is far more commonly used than any other as it is on most of our desktops.

Excel has become a great tool for analysing data. You can perform all the basic descriptive statistics calculations, and can carry out many of the inferential statistics calculations such as ANOVA, t-tests, regression, etc. I accidentally came across the "Descriptive Statistics" option in the Data Analysis tool and checked it out. It calculates 12 statistics in one go, and would be a great way to check out manual calculations. So I created a new video to show how to do this - here it is:

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