A descriptive analysis is used to summarize the data. The summaries can tell us information about the data before formal modeling or hypothesis testing tasks.
There are several methods to create summaries using Excel depending on the level of insights you need. The most popular methods used are descriptive statistics, pivot tables, and histograms.
Descriptive statistics are used to create a summary of the data. It simplifies data using certain indicators. The key indicators are mean, median, mode, standard error, variance, standard deviation, kurtosis, skewness and confidence levels.
Pivot tables in Excel allow you to select specific rows and columns and summarize them in many ways. For example, you can see the number of values of a particular column, its sum, apply filters to it etc.
If we want a visual representation of a data summary in terms of its frequency, we use a Histogram.
These are the three commonly used methods to summarize the data. The indicators can be included or excluded depending on the data and the purpose of the study.