R for Microsoft® Excel Users: Making the Transition for Statistical Analysis

2. Descriptive Statistics

In This Chapter

Descriptive Statistics in Excel

Using R’s DescTools Package

Entering Some Useful Commands

Running Bivariate Analyses with Desc

Analyzing One Factor by Another: The Contingency Table

Regardless of the sort of analysis you have in mind for a particular data set, you want to understand the distribution of the variables in that set. The reasons vary from the mundane (someone entered an impossible value for a variable) to the technical (different sample sizes accompanying different variances).

Any of those events could happen, whether the source of the data is a sales ledger, a beautifully designed medical experiment or a study of political preferences. No matter what the cause, if your data set contains ...