Chapter 12

Analyzing Data with Descriptive Statistics

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Getting Excel’s Analysis ToolPak on the job

Bullet Generating oodles of descriptive statistics

Bullet Calculating moving averages, ranks, and percentiles

Bullet Generating random numbers, for some reason

Bullet Creating frequency distributions and histograms

When you’re analyzing your Excel data using statistics, you can generate results that either describe something about the data or let you infer something about the data.

Describing the data, statistically speaking, means measuring various aspects of the data, including the sum, count, average, maximum, minimum, standard deviation, and so on. All these measures fall under the heading of descriptive statistics.

Making inferences about the data means taking a subset of the total population (which could be people, products, or panda bears) and measuring various aspects of the data that enable you to reach conclusions — inferences — about the population as a whole. The tools and techniques ...

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