Problem:
you are analyzing a dataset and before modeling/analyzing you need to generate descriptive statistics on a field. you have the data loaded in Excel and wondered if there’s a way to do that in Excel.
Solution:
There’s an out of the box solution that will support your needs to generate descriptive statistics on a field. Here are the steps:
Note: for the purpose of this blog post, I am using Excel 2013 but data analysis toolpak is available in Excel 2007+.
1. Active “Data Analysis” toolpak.
Follow this steps: File > Options > Add-ins > Manage: Excel Addins > “GO”
2. make sure to check the “analysis toolpak” checkbox.
3. Now you should see a “data analysis” option under the “Data” pane:
4. Now click on “Data Analysis” and select one of the following options:
Anova, Correlation, Covariance, Descriptive Statistics, Exponential Smoothing, F-Test Two-Sample for Variances, Fourier Analysis, Histogram, Moving Average, Random Number Generation, Rank and Percentile, Regression, Sampling, t-Test, z-Test.
in this case, let’s go with descriptive statistics but you can see that you can perform other tasks as well.
5. Once you click on the descriptive statistics, a dialog box will show up and you will have to enter some data like your input range to generate descriptive statistics. Once you have filled the data needed, click on OK and it should generate descriptive statistics for you in EXCEL!
I hope that helps!
Conclusion:
In this post, we saw how to generate descriptive statistics in Microsoft Excel.
Author: Paras Doshi
