How do you find the Mean Absolute Deviation on Excel?

Answer 1

First you need to know the steps involved in getting the Mean Absolute Deviation, which are:

1 find the mean (average)

2. find the difference between each data value and the mean

3. take the absolute value of each difference

4. find the mean (average) of these differences

To do these things you need only two of Excel's functions. AVERAGE to get the mean and ABS to get the absolute value. Say your values are in the cells from A2 to A18. First you get the mean of those cells. Say we put this formula into cell A20. Then your formula in A20 would be:

=AVERAGE(A2:A18)

Combining steps 2 and 3, you could get the absolute of the difference for each value. Starting in cell B2, the cell beside the first value, you would put the following formula and then copy it down to B18:

=ABS(A$20-A2)

Then in B20 you you would put:

=AVERAGE(B2:B18)

That would give you your final result. In your instance you may need adjust the cell references.