This tutorial assumes you have already downloaded and installed the academic version of Statlets. If not, please press the [Links] button, go to Statlets web site and download and install it on your computer. This tutorial also assumes that the data includes the entire population of interest and not just a sample. If your data comes from a sample, you should use the Summary Statistics tutorial.

 

How to Calculate Descriptive Statistics Using Statlets

 

1. When you start Statlets, the following spreadsheet should appear. If not, click on the "File" pull down window and select "New."

 

2. Click on "Col_1" and the entire row should become shaded.

3. Type a new variable name, let's use "Weight" then press return: Then enter the following numbers, pressing return after each one:

2973

3193

2990

3077

3092

2996

2954

3006

3106

3077

4. Click on the "Summarize" menu and select "Statistics"

the following dialog box will appear:

5. Click on "Weight" then click on arrowhead that is pointing away from Weight.

6. Click on the "Stats" tab and the following should appear.

7. Click the [Options] button and the following dialog box will appear:

8. If you click on the white boxes that do not have check marks, a check mark will appear. Do this until all the boxes have check marks except for "Standard deviation" and "Variance." Get rid of the check mark by "Standard deviation" by clicking on the check mark. The reason that we do not want the variance is because Statlets calculates variance by [Sum of Squares divided by (n - 1)] instead of (Sum of Squares divided by n).

9.  Then press OK.

10. Now we want to save this output by either printing it or doing a screen capture.

To print, click on the "File" pull-down menu and select "Print." The following dialog box will appear.

Make sure that the radio button for "Current tab only" is selected as shown above, then press the "OK" button.

Instead of printing, or in addition to it, you can do a screen capture and then paste the screen image into a document. To do a screen capture, hold down the "Alt" key as you press the "Print Screen" key. This puts the active window (your results) in your computer's clipboard. Now, without closing Statlet, open your word processor (Word, Works, WordPerfect, etc) and do a paste (either Edit/Paste or hold down the "Ctrl" key as you press the "v" key). All the images in this tutorial were done using this method of screen capturing. Note: if you press the "Print Screen" key without pressing the "Alt" button, you will capture the entire screen and not just the active window (which is all we need to capture) for our purposes.

11. Now we will rig our data so that we can calculate the appropriate standard deviation and variance based on the entire population (Sum of Squares divided by n). We do this by adding the mean as a score in our data. This will increase the n by 1 but will not change the Sum of Squared deviations from the mean because the mean minus the mean is zero. To add the mean to the data, we open the "Window" pull-down menu and select "Data Statlet."

12. In the Weight column, row 11, type in the value of the mean, 3046.4, then press your enter key. Don't round the number, as this would add to the sum of squares. Now open the "Window" pull-down menu and select "Statistics 1." Note that the "Sample Size" should now read "11" - it has increase by 1, but the "Mean" should still read "3046.4."

13. Press the [Options] button. Put check marks only by "Variance" and "Standard deviation."

14. Then press the [OK] button. You should now get the following:

15. Now we want to save this output by either printing it or doing a screen capture following step #10 above.

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