Mean or Arithmetic Mean or Average - Descriptive Statistics using Microsoft Excel Statistical Functions - Measures of Central Tendency

The practice sheet can be downloaded from Link. Statistics Marks Data - Download Sheet

About the Data Sheet - The data in this sheet is related to marks scored by 100 Students in a Statistical Test. 

Based on the data, we will use Microsoft Excel Statistical functions to analyse the descriptive statistics. 

Mean or Arithmetic Mean or Average

The mean, also referred to by statisticians as the average, is the most common statistic used to measure the center of a numerical data set.

The mean is the sum of all the values in the data set divided by the number of values in the data set. 

The mean of the entire population is called the population mean, and the mean of a sample is called the sample mean.

The mean may not be a fair representation of the data, because the average is easily influenced by outliers (very small or large values in the data set that are not typical).

In Microsoft Excel there is no mean function, we use AVERAGE Function 

=AVERAGE(number1, [number2],...)

Returns the average (arithmetic mean) of the Data Set.

In the

Data Sheet, we have Data from A2:A101, A1 being the header of the Data. 

=AVERAGE(A2:A101)

Result is 73.99 or rounded of to 74.

  

Average in this context means on an average the Students scored 74 marks in the test.

If you want to include logical values and text representations of numbers in a reference as part of the calculation, use the AVERAGEA function.

The practice sheet can be downloaded from Link. Statistics Marks Data - Download Sheet