Calculating basic statistics and moving averages in Excel

In this session, we will calculate some basic descriptive statistics and moving averages in Excel. This is valuable skill to have as it allows you to summarise complex datasets that can be very large. In this particular tutorial, we will work with an Open Access dataset from the site Pangaea, that was deposited as part of a Marine Biodiversity Records paper authored by Guihen in 2012. This is physical oceanographic data collected from within a cold-water coral reef in Norway. Whilst the dataset we use is predominantly physical in nature, all marine scientists will need to conduct similar descriptive statistics on other datasets.

In this particular, example, I show you how to summarise a simple column of data, in this case Current Velocity (V). I calculate minimum, maximum, the mean, standard deviation and variance. I then move to calculate a correlation and then create a moving average. See below for examples of the three tasks that I undertake in the video:

Task 1, calculate the minimum, maximum, mean, standard deviation and variance for the column V (current speed).

Task 2, calculate the correlation between V (current speed) and Temp (temperature).

Task 3, calculate a moving average for V (current speed) and plot the data along with the value of V.