Although it is true, Excel is a program that is part of the well-known Microsoft Office office suite and consists of spreadsheet software that, in general, it is used to carry out mathematical and/or financial tasks based on any environment (academic, professional, business, etc.).
In this sense, it offers the possibility of perform all kinds of numerical calculations to manage any flow of data effectively. For this reason, it allows to do simple mathematical operations and among these, is calculate the average of a set of numberseasily and quickly.
Therefore, if you need generate reports in which you must present the mean of in a certain data set, it is recommended that you use Excel for it. So, in order for you to carry out the necessary procedure correctly, in this post we explain how to obtain such numerical information through this program.
What is a mean or average in Microsoft Excel and when is it necessary to obtain it?
In mathematics and statistics, a mean or average also known as “arithmetic mean”, refers to the result that is obtained by dividing with the sum of various quantities by the digit that represents them in their entirety, basically. That is, is the characteristic value of a series of quantitative data.
In other words, it is a number that results from the study or the sum of a set of values by dividing it by the number of addends. Therefore, it consists of a finite value that, in order to obtain it, it will be necessary to have two related quantities, at leastin order to discover its midpoint.
However, thanks to its usefulness for different studies, the average has been classified as a digit of great interest, due to the fact that be able to measure the central tendency or the location of the center of a group of numbers within a statistical distribution.
Thus, it will be necessary to calculate an arithmetic mean in the following cases:
- In the educational field, it is usually used to obtain the indicator of the academic level of a student.
- It also allows you to verify the average value of profits a company acquires for a year or at any time interval.
- Used to know the average number of days that a given employee worked and those that did not.
- In environmental terms, it is useful for measure the central tendency of temperature for a day or a week, for example.
- It is a very juicy figure to carry out research based on economics. For example, average inflation rates.
For its part, to better understand the concept of an average, it is worth presenting a small sample of how this numerical value works below:
- First of all, you have a group of digits that are: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12.
- So, once you perform the summation of this set of numbers, you can get a total of 42.
- Now, it is verified that there are 6 numbers that are part of said set. Well, all that remains is to divide the sum by the total number of digits, which would be: 42 divided by 6in order to obtain an average of 7.
Steps to get the mean of a data set in Microsoft Excel
However, despite the fact that it is a very simple numerical operation when there are few numerical data to be related, the truth is that this is notably complicated by having to average a much larger set of digits. Therefore, Microsoft Excel has designed a function that allows you to do this. automatically.
In this sense, to enjoy remarkable simplicity when managing your numerical data and be able to calculate the average of said set of valuesIt is important that you know how to carry out the procedure from Excel, in a timely manner and here, we mention each step to follow:
- To compute the arithmetic mean of several numbers that are in a contiguous row or column in an Excel sheet, you must start with access the program document where the data to be studied is located.
- After that, you have to click a cell below or to the right of the numbers (which will depend on how they are arranged, either horizontally in rows or vertically in columns). In this case, we will have to click on a cell located below.
- Next, it is time to select the “Home” tab from the ribbon, and then click the arrow located on the option “Autosum” (located in the Modify group) and within the options that are displayed, just click on “Average”.
- Finally, automatically, the entire row or column where the digits to be calculated are expressed will be selected and at that moment, you have to press the enter key.
- Done the above, right in the cell that you have chosen at the beginning, you will get the central value or the arithmetic mean.
In addition to this mechanism to follow, also there is another more practical way to calculate the average of a set of numerical values using Microsoft Excel. Next, we explain what it consists of:
- First of all, search and enter the spreadsheet document where all the data to be averaged are found.
- Following that, select the entire row or column of those digits and click on the box that is displayed in the lower right corner of the last cell (in this case because it is vertical).
- Now, among all the options shown below, click on the “Totals” tab and there, press where it says “Average”. Immediately, that value will be displayed in the next cell.
As you will see, this last procedure is a way much faster to obtain and/or calculate the arithmetic mean of any data set displayed in a Microsoft Excel sheet. Taking into account that, whatever route you take for it, the result will be the same using this program.
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