18 Oct LAB UNIT 6: DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS & GRAPHING IN MICROSOFT EXCEL
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EXERCISE 1: Watch Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 minutes (4:47). Pay attention to how Rosling uses measures of central tendency and variability to describe nations and health outcomes. Write a paragraph or so describing how Rosling uses ONE measure of central tendency and ONE measure of variability. What kinds of conclusions can be drawn from descriptive statistics?
(Upload your paragraph as a document in Brightspace when you upload your Excel file for the rest of the assignment.) |
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SPREADSHEET BASICS |
Microsoft Excel is the dominant spreadsheet program. Learning some basic familiarity with it will serve you well in this course and in future jobs and personal tasks.
In a spreadsheet, columns are labeled with letters, and rows are labeled with numbers. Individual cells are identified by their column and row headings. For example, the upper left cell is A1, the one immediately to the right is B1, the one below that is B2, and so forth. Below is a screen image with the basic spreadsheet components labeled.
To enter data into Excel, simply type the text, value, or formula into the highlighted cell. The arrow keys can be used to navigate right-left-up-down from cell to cell. The Enter key also moves the cursor down the columns and the Tab key moves the cursor across the rows. If information in a cell spills over into the next cell, you can adjust cell settings to widen the cell by clicking and dragging the right edge of the cell containing the letter that heads the column, or use the Wrap Text menu:
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EXERCISE 2: Enter these data into Excel |
Table 1. Sex-role stereotyping scores for three samples who saw different advertisements.
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USING FORMULAS |
Excel has built-in formulas that allow you to perform common calculations. You can type these in by hand, or you can use the automatic functions. To access these formulas, use the Insert Function icon fx, which is found on the formula bar just about the worksheet. The following set of exercises will show how to calculate mean, median, mode, and standard deviation for a data set.
MEAN
- With the mouse, select the cell into which you want to place the calculated mean by double-clicking in that cell.
- Click on fx on the tool bar.
- Search for AVERAGE and select that function.
- Click OK, and the AVERAGE dialog box will appear.
- In the text box labeled Number 1, type in the cells that are to be averaged. If the cells to be averaged are in a series, then you can type in the first cell of the series and the last cell of the series separated by a colon (e.g., to sum cells A1 through A5, type A1:A5). If the cells to be averaged are not in a series, then commas should be used to separate the cells to be averaged.
- Click OK. The calculation based on the formula you used will be entered into the cell highlighted in the first step.
- With the highlighted cell selected, notice that the AVERAGE function and formula appear in the formula bar.
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COPYING THE FORMULA |
TIP: To select many of the following commands, you can either (a) use the pull-down menus at the top of the window, or (b) right-click the mouse to get a context-specific menu of commands.
If you want to copy the same formula into another cell, here is a shortcut:
- Select the cell to be copied with the right-click button on the mouse.
- Select Copy.
- Click on the cell where you want the copied cell contents to appear.
- Select Paste.
- The formula will be adjusted to reflect that you are in a new column or row, but be sure to check the formula to make sure it is correct. If you need to correct the formula, click within the contents of the formula bar to locate the cursor there, edit the formula, and press Enter.
Alternately, you can click and drag to copy the contents of a cell.
- Click in the cell you want to copy.
- Locate the tiny green box at the lower right of the cell, and hover your mouse over it until your pointer becomes a +.
- Left-click and drag to the cell you want to copy into.
