in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to use the data analysis toolpak to return some descriptive statistics about your data in microsoft excel this includes the mean standard error median mode and so much more i'll not only demonstrate how to create the descriptive statistics but i'll also interpret each one as always if you find this content useful please let me know by leaving a like on this video now let's dive into excel and get started in my excel sheet i have a sample of data in my first column that i want some descriptive statistics for a useful feature in excel that many people do not know about is the data analysis toolpak the data analysis toolpak is an add-on created by microsoft to make it easier to perform different data analysis procedures to ensure that the tool pack is activated correctly go to file options then select add-ins at the bottom where it says manage ensure that you select the excel add-ins and then click go then make sure that you have the analysis toolpak option ticked and then click the ok button now when you select the data tab at the top of your screen you should see a data analysis button that appears now we're ready to perform the descriptive statistics to do this i will select the data analysis button then from the list i will select descriptive statistics for the input range this is where you want to enter the range of cells containing your data so i will click on the up arrow button to the right and then i'll highlight my data and then press the enter key you next need to tell excel how your data are entered into your sheet if you have the values stacked in a column as i have done in this example then these will be grouped by columns if these are entered into rows instead then i will select the rows option here if you also have labels at the top of your data in the first row then select this option here i haven't got any labels in my example so i'll leave this option unchecked for the output options this is where you specify where you want the descriptive statistics to be returned for the first option you can enter a specific cell in the same worksheet where you want the results to be entered the second option will enter the results in a new worksheet and the third option will enter the descriptive statistics in an entirely new excel file i'm going to have my results entered into the same worksheet as my data and i'll place them around here underneath you can tick the various descriptive statistic options that you want to perform i'll tick all options and explain each one in more detail shortly so that's the setup done i'll now press the ok button to perform the descriptive statistics as you can see i now have my results entered next to my data and i'll now go through each one in more detail the first result is the mean or average value this is where you would add up all the values in your sample and divide by the count in other words the number of values in the sample you can calculate this separately by using the average function underneath we have the standard error the standard error is a measure of the variability of the sample means in a sum point distribution of means the higher the standard error the higher the variability you can calculate this yourself by taking the standard deviation and dividing it by the square root of the count moving on we have the median say we have sorted our data in ascending order from smallest to largest the median will be the number that lies in the middle of these values in this case the answer is 50.3 you can calculate the median separately by using the median function after this we have the mode the mode represents the value that appears the most in the sample the mode for my example is 49.8 since this value appears twice if you want to calculate the mode yourself you can use the mode.sngl function after the mode there is the standard deviation the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation in the data relative to the mean where the higher the standard deviation the higher the variability if you'd like to calculate the standard deviation of a sample separately then you can use the stdev dot s function related to the standard deviation we also have the variance the variance is simply the square of the standard deviation and if you like to learn more about the variance then i suggest that you check out this tutorial the excel function for the variant of a sample is var.s under the variance value we have the ketosis ketosis is a measure that defines how heavily the tails of a distribution differ from the tails of a normal distribution in excel a normal distribution has a ketosis value of zero positive values indicate a relatively peaked distribution whereas negative values indicate a relatively flat distribution so i can see that my data has heavier tails than the normal distribution next up we have skewness skewness is a measure of asymmetry of the data distribution a value of zero indicates a perfectly symmetrical distribution if the value is between negative one and one but isn't zero then the data are considered fairly skewed and if the value is outside this range then the data are highly skewed in excel you can use the skew function to calculate the skewness value separately moving on we have the range the range is simply the difference between the smallest and largest values in the data underneath i can see that the minimum value is 39.4 and the maximum value is 63.3 so the difference of these two is 23.9 and this is the range if you want to calculate the minimum and maximum values separately then you can use the min and max functions respectively next up we have the sum the sum is simply the total when you add up all of the values in your data and you can use the sum function to calculate this yourself the count is the number of values in your data in my case i have 25 individual values now during the data analysis setup if you've selected the kth largest option then you'll also have this result here in the setup i specified one in the box this means i'm asking excel to work out the first largest value in my data which is 63.3 if i inputted two instead then the second largest value will be returned and so on and so forth similarly if you selected the kth smallest option you'll also have this result here since i inputted one in this example this means i'm asking excel to work out the first smallest value in my data which is 39.4 again if i imported two for example then the second smallest value will be returned instead finally the last entry in the descriptive statistics table we have is the confidence interval value this is the value that you can add and subtract from the mean value to calculate the upper and lower 95 percent confidence intervals respectively i go into a little bit more detail about this in this video here and this brings me to the end of this tutorial you now know how to calculate and interpret some descriptive statistics in 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