Now let’s understand these three formulas: This narrows down the number of formulas to three (STDEV.S, STDEVA, and STDEV function) You can read a great explanation of it here (read the first response). You can use the sample data to calculate the standard deviation and infer for the entire population. In such a case, you pick a sample from the population. On the other hand, you use term ‘sample’ when using a population is not possible (or it’s unrealistic to do so). In almost all of the cases, you will use standard deviation for a sample.Īgain in layman terms, you use the term ‘population’ when you want to consider all the datasets in the entire population.
Calculating the standard deviation for an entire population: The formulas in this category are STDEV.P, STDEVPA, and STDEVP.
Calculating the sample standard deviation: The formulas in this category are STDEV.S, STDEVA, and STDEV.
These six formulas can be divided into two groups: There are six standard deviation formulas in Excel (eight if you consider database functions as well). While it’s easy to calculate the standard deviation, you need to know which formula to use in Excel. This can also be a case when there are many outliers in the data set.
A higher value indicates that there is widespread variation in the data points.
A lower value indicates that the data points tend to be closer to the average (mean) value.
Now let’s interpret the standard deviation value: It means that most of the people’s weight is within 4 kg of the average weight (which would be 56-64 kg). In this data set, the average weight is 60 kg, and the standard deviation is 4 kg.
Example – Calculating the Standard Deviation for Weight DataĪ standard deviation value would tell you how much the data set deviates from the mean of the data set.įor example, suppose you have a group of 50 people, and you are recording their weight (in kgs).
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