Reply 1
Amber Aimar
Using Microsoft Excel
Excel is extremely valuable when creating and analyzing data for presentation purposes. It can be beneficial for helping researchers not only display their data and results, but also help with the statistical analyzing that must take place in a research study. I will have to admit though, this was very difficult for me to maneuver. It has been a very long time since I used Excel, so there was definitely some “playing around” with the features and also researching helpful tips for people like myself who are not so well versed in Microsoft excel. I manually entered all the data, which did take time, however not a difficult task. I highlighted the data I had entered and clicked the analyze data tab, which gave me several charts and graphs using different highlighted areas evaluation. I then clicked the insert statistical graph and chose the histogram style as well as clicked the recommended graphs. It was through those two features that I found appropriate graphs to display the data for this research study.
Plans for Future Excel Use
I think that through this assignment, I will be better prepared and equipped to use Excel in the future. Depending on the data I am trying to analyze I am sure I will need further support in finding the correct features and tools to analyze my findings. For this assignment I researched on our South University library articles that help explain data entry and graph display. I found an article titled “Preparing data for analysis using microsoft Excel” which was extremely helpful. In the future I would imagine I would continue my research on using
Excel in this same way.
References
Elliott, A. C., Hynan, L. S., Reisch, J. S., & Smith, J. P. (2006). Preparing data for analysis using
microsoft Excel. Journal of Investigative Medicine : The Official Publication of the American
Federation for Clinical Research, 54(6), 334–341. https://doi-
org.su.idm.oclc.org/10.2310/6650.2006.05038
Reply 2
Excel is a very convenient way to control the data that is collected in research. The most time-consuming part of Excel is entering in all the data that has been collected, but once that is all entered it’s doesn’t take long to create your equations. When the descriptive statistics function is used, it computes and solves for the mean, median, mode, sum, and range of the data that has been entered (Airth, n.d). This type of information is useful with the data that has been collected from research. I honestly have not opened excel in years, but I was quite surprised at how easy it was to work. After typing in the data that was given to us, I had to add on the descriptive statistics function to my Excel before I could run it. I then chose the descriptive statistics function, copied my data, and had it open to a new page in my workbook. From there I was able to see my data broken down per column. After this discussion post requirement, I took some time to play around with the data that we were given and the functions of excel. It is useful to have excel when there is data that needs to be broken down or represented. There are many different options for turning the data into graphs. Once the data is placed into a graph, you can customize it to be exactly how you want your data to be represented. These tools that are found in Excel will be very beneficial moving forward in data collection for research.
Airth, M. (n.d.). Using Excel for Descriptive Statistics. Study.com. Retrieved from https://study.com/academy/lesson/using-excel-for-descriptive-statistics.html
