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FrancesH1810's avatar
FrancesH1810
Copper Contributor
Feb 10, 2022

Descriptive statistics

For my dissertation, my supervisor wants me to carry out descriptive statistics for some of my questions; I am trying to carry out descriptive statistics for one of my questions which contains different age categories (such as 18-20, 60+, and a prefer not to say option) but whenever I try to carry this out, I keep getting a message saying 'input range contains non-numeric data'. Why is this happening? I'm struggling to carry out descriptive statistics on SPSS so I want to do it on Excel instead.

2 Replies

  • JKPieterse's avatar
    JKPieterse
    Silver Contributor

    FrancesH1810 Sounds like the data in your Excel file isn't "clean": Numbers recognized as numbers for example, but rather seen/treated as text.
    When you select the cells which should contain numbers, a small icon should appear. Click that icon it will allow you to change the numbers to numbers:

     

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