Using Excel is a daily task in the modern medical laboratory but staff have a wise spectrum of abilities. Often people really first experience excel, or any spreadsheets, when they have a project to hand in or an analysis to complete. No matter what the analysis, the first figure in any write up will always be the same, summary statistics to describe the data.

By the end of this course you will not only learn two ways to generate descriptive statistics but also two methods to visualise your data.

Specifically we will deonstatrate how to get a quick win with generating descriptive statistics using the analysis ToolPak

This is a very useful tool, but sometimes for our analyses we need some more detail in our descriptives so we can add to them using individual functions in excel. This helps us really understand our data so that when remove on to visualising our data in summary form we already have an expectation of what our data looks like.

We will show two of the most useful visualisations we have available to us, histograms and box plots. As with the summaries there is more than one way to build these and we will walk through two examples of how to generate histograms so that you will be able to do it, no matter what version of excel you have.

Finally, we will share some best practice tips for laying out the data in our summary table so that it is ready for publication and review.