Chapter 12
Analyzing Data Using Descriptive Statistics
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting Excel’s Analysis ToolPak on the job
Generating oodles of descriptive statistics
Calculating moving averages, ranks, and percentiles
Generating random numbers, for some reason
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 (for example, 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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