Reference no: EM132885832

Many statistical procedures call for complex and lengthy mathematical formulas. Thankfully, there are a wealth of software programs that can calculate these statistics for us. You may have heard of some of these programs, and many have incredible functionality for those who work with statistics on a regular basis.

For the vast majority of us who are not statisticians, Excel is a commonly used program and has an excellent variety of statistical tools available. In order to utilize and access these tools easily, your first step will be to add on the data analysis toolpack to your Excel account. If you are completely unfamiliar with Excel, the link to the Excel help website is listed in your Lifeline, and will provide you with the basics of navigating the software.

Your module notes have introduced you to descriptive statistics. Let's run some descriptive statistics using Excel. The short video above walks you through the data analysis toolpack add-in and the process for running descriptive statistics.

Using the Dayton & Montgomery County Public Health website (Links to an external site.), pull the data from the first graph on the accidental overdose death totals for 2017. You will be creating an Excel worksheet with this data.

- Label your worksheet "Accidental Overdose Death Totals Montgomery County,"

- Label your column A "Month."

- Label column B "2017" and contain the numbers of overdose deaths for that month.

- When you are done labeling your worksheet and entering the data for 2017, calculate your descriptive statistics for this data set.

- In a separate Word document, imagine you are describing your data to a layperson. What does each of the descriptives tell you about the data set? Be sure to describe what each measure of central tendency and variability from your Excel output table tells the reader about what the data actually says.