Chapter 7
Summarizing It All
IN THIS CHAPTER
Working with things great and small
Understanding symmetry, peaks, and plateaus
Getting descriptive
Serving up statistics on a tray
Measures of central tendency and variability are excellent ways of summarizing a set of scores. They aren't the only ways, though: Central tendency and variability make up a subset of descriptive statistics. Some descriptive statistics are intuitive — like count, maximum, and minimum. Some are not — like skewness and kurtosis.
In this chapter, I discuss descriptive statistics, and I show you Excel's capabilities for calculating them and visualizing them.
Counting Out
The most fundamental descriptive statistic I can imagine is the number of scores in a set of scores. Excel offers five ways to determine that number. Yes, five ways. Count them.
COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, COUNTIF, COUNTIFS
Given an array of cells, COUNT gives you the amount of those cells that contain numerical data. Figure 7-1 shows that I've entered a group of scores, selected a cell to hold COUNT's result, and opened the Function Arguments ...
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