Statistics Introduction to Excel

Hi and welcome to www.educator.com.0000

We are going to be doing a short lesson introducing you to Excel.0002

If you already worked with Excel before please feel free to move on.0007

Before we get to visualizing distributions in Excel, we just want to give you a little overview.0013

Excels are nice handy spreadsheet program.0018

It is pretty easy to use, most computers have it and it is useful because a lot of companies and laboratories use Excel.0021

It is a nice real life skill to have.0029

Another thing about Excel is that it is a good short intro to programming.0032

It can handle iterative computations, computations that you have to do over and over again and small calculations in bulk.0036

Here is how Excel is organized, it is based on workbooks.0047

Think of a file as a workbook, it is a series of what we call sheets.0052

Each file when you save an Excel file is a collection called the workbook.0056

Just to show you on a real Excel workbook, notice how it says workbook up there.0065

When you save this file and I hit save here, this whole file is going to save several sheets and the sheets are listed down here.0070

Now we only have one sheet but here I'm going to add on another sheet.0079

We have sheet 1 and 2.0084

You can have 4 or 5, all kinds of different sheet.0086

You can also rename these sheets to whatever you want.0090

We could call this one data.0093

And there you go, that is our sheets.0097

It is a little bit small here and let me try to, it still ends up being small but hopefully you could see that in the corner of your screen.0099

In each worksheet you are going to see columns and rows.0112

Columns are going to be shown to you and indexed by a letter.0116

Columns are always letters like ABCD.0122

The rows on the other hand are always going to be indexed by numbers like 12345.0126

Each cell or square has a name that you can index by saying the column name and the row name.0132

Something like A1, B5, these are all cell names.0140

Each cell can accept a number, text, or formula.0146

We will get into what those are.0150

Just to show you again in Excel here my columns indexed by letters like A, B, C, D.0153

Here my rows indexed by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.0163

And each cell has A, B, C, D and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.0164

If you click on this cell, this cell is B2.0174

Let us talk a little bit about the tools.0183

The toolbar in Excel usually have a menu bar which is sort of your standard Microsoft suite toolbar.0186

It also usually has a toolbar for things like formatting your words and letters, fonts, colors, whether you want things to be centered or not.0195

Those things are pretty basic.0206

It usually has a formula bar.0208

This is new to Excel and different from all the other Microsoft suite programs.0210

In order to let Excel know that you want to type in a formula, you start the formula with an equal sign (=).0217

Just to show you that on Excel, here I could write down A, B, C or I could write down a number.0224

Here we have your standard toolbar for things like hey I want to save it or I want to print it.0237

But then you would probably also have something like a formatting palette0246

to help you figure out what font you want to make it out, this 10 to be a red.0250

Do I want my 10 spaced in the middle or aligned to the left?0259

You can also make this 10 facing in different directions that we could turn it orthogonally.0269

Let me turn it back so that we will get to use it again.0277

If I want to write a formula I would just start by writing an equal sign (=).0280

A formula can take lots of things and we are going to into what some of those things mean.0286

One of the things that can do in a formula is I can reference another cell.0290

Let us say I want the cell to have whatever is in this cell B2.0295

If I click on B2 then this formula says this cell is going to be equal to whatever is in B2.0300

Click enter and it should have the same thing that was in B2.0307

I could change B2 like I could make that 100 and that is going to change this one immediately because it is just a formula.0311

It is just pointing to this cell and saying whatever it is in it, take that on as well.0321

Some of you may have a separate formula bar or you might by double-clicking in it be able to see what sort of written in here.0328

We will probably show it to you with the formula just type inside the cell but once again if you want to use the formula bar that is not a problem.0337

That is basically it for Excel organization, now we will go on how to reconcile Excel with the data organization0356

that we learned about in statistics so far.0365

Excel plus data, in Excel we know that a file is called a worksheet.0370

In statistics language that is where we are going to put our data.0378

Each row in Excel is referenced by numbers.0381

Each row in data is going to represent a case.0385

Whatever object we are interested in studying or analyzing.0392

In Excel the columns are going to be referenced by letters and these columns are going to represent variables in our data.0398

Each cell reference by a number and a letter step together like A1, that is going to take on a value.0407

One of our values goes into our variables.0416

That is how Excel and data come together hopefully you have learned a little something from the short intervention.0423

Do not worry if Excel is still a little bit new to you, you will get used to it at the end of this lesson.0430

Thanks for using www.educator.com.0436