Excel Statistics - Average (Mean), Minimum, and Maximum in Excel (Sum Function)

Average (Mean), Minimum, and Maximum in Excel. Obtain Basic Statistics Using the AutoSum Button in Microsoft Excel.

Excel Statistics
Average in Excel
AutoSum Button
Average (Mean), Maximum, Minimum

Video Transcript: In this tutorial we're going to take a look at how to use the AutoSum button in Excel to obtain some basic descriptive statistics. And what we'll do is we'll calculate the average, the minimum, and the maximum values for the following data that we have here. Notice we have the variable GPA here in cell B1, and then we have the GPA of ten different people for our dataset here. Now let's go ahead and click on cell A12 and type Average, since the average is the first thing we'll find. And then go ahead and click on cell B12, and in this cell we're going to calculate the average. So if you go to AutoSum button up here, click on the arrow and select Average. Notice what that does here, that gives us the function, which is called the Average function, and notice in the parentheses here we have B2 colon B11. And you see here that these cells are selected, all of the cells. The way this function works, for this data series in particular here, is that the first cell is shown B2, which is 3.23, and then the colon indicates to take this series beginning at B2 and ending at this last value, B11, or the GPA of 3.11. So we're taking the average at the values B2 through B11, Which is just what we want. So let's go ahead and press the Enter key, and you'll see there we get our average GPA, which is 2.84, if we round to two decimal places. OK let's go ahead and calculate the minimum next. We'll type Min and then go in cell B13, go back to our AutoSum button, select Min, and you'll see this function, equals Min, and then B2 through B12 is selected by Excel. But notice that B12 is included which contains the average, and we actually don't want that. We just want B2 through B11, the GPA values. So let's go ahead and click to the right of 12 in B12, press the backspace key, and edit that to be B11. And notice now we see a blue rectangle around the values, and checking, these are the values we want, all 10 GPA values. So press Enter. And that gives us our minimum of 1.79. And in fact if we look at these 10 values, 1.79 is the lowest GPA, so we see that that's been calculated correctly. OK let's proceed with our last function, maximum. So type Max in cell A14, and then click on the next cell to the right, B14. And here we're going to do our Maximum function, so go and click on the AutoSum button again, select Max. Now notice Excel's done it again. It selected all the numbers above our cell, B14. And we don't want the minimum in there, and we don't want average in there. So we could go ahead and click to the right of B13 and type in B11 instead, but I want to show you another way to do this. If I go ahead and click on cell B2 here, and holding the mouse button down, drag to cell B11, I can go ahead and just manually select that. And notice that it's shown down here in our function, and that's just what we want. So go ahead and press Enter. And we've got our maximum of 3.98. Let's go ahead and inspect these values just to make sure. Here's the 3.98, that is the largest GPA of my 10 values, so it looks like this has been calculated correctly. So this is one way to obtain some basic descriptive statistics in Excel. And we will cover other ways in other tutorials, but this is a handy and quick and easy way to do it using our AutoSum button in Excel. This concludes the tutorial on finding some basic descriptive statistics using the AutoSum button in Microsoft Excel.