Excel has very powerful formulas and add-ins for performing almost any kind of statistical analysis. Today we will learn how you can make a statistical distribution of test scores using excel.
This is a part of our spreadcheats series of posts where we aim to solve 30 common work related excel problems, one at a time. Read the earlier spreadcheats here.
Just follow the below 2 steps to create statistical distribution / frequency of any set of values using excel. Also, download the statistical distributions example workbook and play with it.
1. Define the bands for distribution
Assuming the test scores range from 0 to 100, you can define score bands like 10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90,100
2. Create a frequency formula and array enter it in to the spreadsheet
This part is even easier.
Assuming the test scores are in the range B6:B105 and bands are in the range c6:c15:
First select the cells D6:D16 (10 cells, 1 each for the frequency between 0-10, 10-20, 20-30, … 90-100) and then enter the FREQUENCY() formula.
What is FREQUENCY() formula?
FREQUENCY is an excel function that takes a range of values and a range of bands and tells you how the values are distributed in the bands. As you can guess, the formula returns an array of frequencies, so it must be entered in a bunch of cells together.
How do you do that? Simple, select a range of cells, enter the formula in the first cell by start typing =frequency… and when you are done, just press ctrl+shift+enter and excel takes care of the rest.
The formula we need to enter in our case is, =FREQUENCY(B6:B105,C6:C15) and when you press ctrl+shift+enter instead of just enter. The frequency values for each band will be entered in the corresponding row.
See the screencast below to understand it better.
That is all. So simple isn’ t it?
Download the statistical distributions example workbook and play with the formulas yourself.
More on statistics and excel:
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.