Excel is a standard spreadsheet processor, a type of software that is widely used to present and manipulate numerical information. A typical file associated with Excel is called a spreadsheet, which can be thought of as very large table with cells that can be identified by the row (a number) and the column (a letter) in which it appears, much like a roadmap. You can enter numbers into some cells and then program the sheet to calculate something using these numbers and store the result in another cell. You can also produce a wide variety of graphs from the numerical data in the spreadsheet.
The purpose of this exercise is to acquaint you with spreadsheets by using Excel to present some data and calculate simple descriptive statistics for that data.
Proceed as follows:
1. Make sure that a relatively recent version of Excel is available on the computer you are using. This will be the case for all computers in campus labs, and you may have Excel on your personal computer as well.
2. Click on the following link: MTH107ExcelIntro.xls
This will download a simple spreadsheet and open it in Excel
on the computer you are using. There is
some text material and four simple exercises for you to complete. You will be making entries only in the gray
cells. If, for some reason, things get
messed up you can always reload the original sheet and start again. You may have some experience with
Excel already.
Don’t insert any new rows or columns, since the instructions refer to
specific cell addresses that you don’t want to change.
You can print out the spreadsheet if you prefer, but some of the text at the extreme left may be cut off.
3. Read through the text material and follow the instructions to learn some simple manipulations with Excel, then complete the 4 exercises.
4. Enter your name in the gray cells at the top of the sheet and print the worksheet out.
You may discard the partial pages of extreme left text. Hand this in, together with your answers to the following questions. Your sheet will not be accepted without these written answers.
Question 1. What, exactly, did you enter into cell F15 to calculate the median? This should not be a number that you calculated by hand, but an Excel formula like the one that appears in cell A16.
Question 2. What, exactly, did you enter into cell H15 to find the standard deviation? This should not be a number that you calculated by hand, but an Excel formula like the one that appears in cell A16.
Question 3. How did you get Excel to compute the mean (average) and median for the given data. Explain here how these numbers appear related to the histogram. DO THIS BEFORE GOING ON TO EXERCISE 4.
Question 4. Give the cell addresses where you have presented the mean and median for the data you made up.