Spreadsheets Tutorial: Introduction to Statistics in Spreadsheets

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/introduction-to-statistics-in-spreadsheets at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Welcome to the course! I'm Ted and I'll be your instructor. What is a statistic? It's just a piece of information from a large quantity of data. Simply put, a statistic describes data in some way, and in this course, you'll learn about different statistics you can use to extract insights from your data. Let's begin with averages. An average is an information reduction technique. You start with a data population which may be too large to understand so you need a way to reduce the amount of information into a comprehensible amount. For example, there are 126 million people living in Japan. That's a lot of people! You could look at a list of every person & their age to intuit something about the population's age. However, it's easier to take a mean average to understand the population. A mean is the sum of all observations in your population or sample divided by the number of observations in that population or sample. This is a sample of 10 Japanese ages. Summing the ages, you get 473. Therefore the mean average is 473 divided by 10 or 47.3. Mean reduces information from these 10 observations to one value. Let's compare Japan's average age, 47.3 to Uganda's average age. The Ugandan sample sums to 158 & the count is 10. Thus the Ugandan mean is 15.8. Comparing the two samples Ugandans have a lower average age compared to Japan. In this example you didn't have to compare all 20 samples to arrive at this conclusion, simply taking an average of each was enough to help you learn about the sample differences. Another average is the "median". The median is the middle number of a data set. When sorted from smallest to largest half the numbers are less than the median & half the numbers are above the median. The Japanese ages have been sorte