How To Calculate The Mean In Microsoft Excel

First things first, you’ll need to open a new Excel spreadsheet. Double click the Excel icon on your homepage to boot up Excel, and then select a fresh spreadsheet.

Don’t worry about any fancy templates – just a basic blank spreadsheet will work.

Now you can start filling in the cells in the spreadsheet with your numbers.

The way you do this is important, so be careful to fill each number in properly.
Start in cell A1 and enter your first number.

Press enter, and Excel will automatically move you onto the next cell: A2. Continue down the A column, filling each cell with a number in the set that you want to find the average of.

For example, if you wanted to find the mean of the numbers 1-25, you would have one number in each cell from A1 to A25.

You don’t need to worry about the order of the numbers, as Excel will sort them automatically when calculating the mean of the set.

However, it’s important to just stick to one column and not leave any gaps between cells.

When you’ve finished filling in the numbers you want to find the mean of, you can start running your calculations!
Click on cell B1 to highlight it. From here, you need to input a specific formula into this cell.

Enter this into B1 exactly (but without the quotation marks): “=AVERAGE(A:A)”. The ‘A’s in the brackets are the range of cells you’re calculating, and you’ll need to fill this in yourself; using the same example as earlier, this would look like “=AVERAGE(A1:A25)”.

Once you’ve input the formula and entered the cell range, press enter.

From here, Excel will automatically sort and find the average of the numbers in these cells, and the mean of the numbers will appear in cell B1.
The mean is the default average on Microsoft Excel, although you can also use Excel to calculate other forms of average (we’ll get to that in a minute). This means that you can just use =AVERAGE to find the mean in no time at all!

If you accidentally input the wrong numbers or simply want to change some, don’t worry – this is simple to do.

All you have to do is click on the cell you want to change and input the new number.

Now you can just re-enter the =AVERAGE(A:A) formula and the answer will update to the new mean!

If you want to find other averages, this is also easy to do. Here’s how:

• To find the Mode of a set of numbers, enter “=MODE.MULT(A:A)” in B2
• To find the Median, enter “=MEDIAN(A:A)” in B3
• To find the Range, enter “=MAX(A:A)-MIN(A:A)”