Guide to Excel for statistics

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common statistical functions

• AVERAGE(cells) - arithmetical mean of cells specified
• MEDIAN(cells) - middle value; half the values are greater, half are less than the median
• COUNT(cells) - counts the number of values n; useful for standard error calculation
• VAR(cells) - variance of a sample population; variance = standard deviation squared
• STDEV(cells) - standard deviation of a sample population; measures how much values vary from the mean

You can type these functions straight into the cells starting with the equal sign, e.g. type =stdev(A1:A10). Capitalisation is not important. Replace "cells" in the above list with the cells to be used for the calculation. Cells can be specified by clicking or typing. You can specify a range of cells by stating the (top) left and the (bottom) right cell, e.g. type A1:A10 (10 cells) or A1:B10 (2x10cells). Alternatively, you can enumerate cells using the comma as separator, e.g. A1,A3,A5. If you want to prevent automatic change of the column or row when copying formulae, use the dollar sign, e.g. $A1 will keep the column the same while A$1 will prevent a change in the row number.

evaluation of Excel for statistics

http://www.practicalstats.com/Pages/excelstats.html

links

Tutorials:

• mean & standard deviation with Excel
• standard error of the mean with Excel
• tutorial treating many Excel stats functions