Fastest Way to Show Descriptive Statistics in Excel
(Caption: We're gonna be analyzing this a McDonalds meal! Credit to Brett Jordan on Unsplash)
Introduction
In this post, I'll show you a quick way to show a list of descriptive statistics in Excel! And I'll be analyzing a dataset on Big Mac prices and use a simple tool to get the mean, median, and more. Here's the link to the dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/vittoriogiatti/bigmacprice
So, make sure to read until the end if you're interested to analyze this data in only a couple of mouse clicks!
The "Data Analysis" Feature
The "Data Analysis" feature is an Excel add-in that is very useful when it comes to statistical summaries. For this post, we'll use it to give us descriptive statistics of the Big Mac prices.
However, if you're on the default Excel settings, then you won't see the tool. Here's how to enable it...
Enabling "Data Analysis"
First, click on the "File" ribbon and then on the bottom left hand corner, click on "Options":
This will open a new pop-up window that looks like this:
From there, click on the "Add-Ins" section and then press "Go":
This will take you to another window, and you have to select the box that says "Analysis ToolPak":
After you do that, if you go to the "Data" ribbon back in the Excel main interface, you'll see a button that says "Data Analysis" in the top right corner:
So now, we're ready to get started and create the list of descriptive statistics!
Using "Data Analysis"
If you click on the "Data Analysis" button, then Excel will show you a bunch of analysis tools that it'll automatically do for you:
I encourage you to explore the other tools, but in this post, I'm only going to focus on the "Descriptive Statistics" tool.
So if you select on that, then you'll see a new window where you have to provide which columns or rows you want to analyze:
Since I want to analyze the prices of the Big Macs, I'm gonna have to use the column that has all the prices in the USD currency, which is column F in this dataset. So, select on the first cell in column F and do Ctrl+Shift+Down:
Also, remember to leave the "Grouped By" option as "Columns", NOT "Rows":
And because the first cell is part of our input range, you have to check the "Labels in First Row" option:
Then, make sure that the "Summary Statistics" option is selected because that's the type of output Excel will give you:
If you want, you can choose where you want the descriptive stats to be located. You can either specify the range of cells or you can just create it in a new worksheet, which I'm gonna do.
So, I'll just call the new worksheet "Big Mac Prices Stats" and click on "OK":
Analyzing "Data Analysis"
And that's really all it is! Once you do that, you'll see a new worksheet with the descriptive statistics on the Big Mac prices column:
If you want to see me analyze this output, then make sure to check out my full video over here: https://youtu.be/508jcQMqYvI
I hope to see you there, and thank you for reading all the way here!