I have been using Excel for well over three decades. When I initially used the software package, it was perhaps the first version of the product and I don’t even recall it having an undo button on it. Since that time, however, Excel has undergone many incarnations and it is now a very sophisticated business tool.
Because Excel has become so sophisticated (and because I subscribe to Microsoft Office) I thought it would be a good idea to use the software package to carry out statistical operations.
What is statistics?
Statistics is an area of applied mathematics concerned with the data collection, analysis, interpretation and presentation.
Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.
There are two main types of statistics, being descriptive and inferential.
Descriptive statistics
Descriptive statistics summarises and describes the main features of a dataset. It uses the data to provide descriptions of the population, either through numerical calculations, graphs, or tables. It is mainly focused on the main characteristics of data, providing a graphical summary of it. Descriptive statistics is a method to describe and understand the features of a specific…