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Title screen: How to Calculate Range. Copyright ©2017 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
Narrator: "In this video, we will use Excel's MAX and MIN functions to find the range in a data set. Range is a measure of dispersion. It shows the distance between the largest and smallest value in a data set. This data set shows 13 years of annual revenue for domestic sales, international sales, total sales, and it also shows the number of employees that a company has for those 13 years. Excel does not have a range formula. Instead, we calculate range by finding the largest number in a data set, then subtracting from it the smallest number in that data set. The Excel function to find the largest value is MAX. For the smallest value, we use MIN. We could do the entire calculation in a single cell, but for clarity I'm splitting it into three cells—one each for MAX, MIN, and range. In the MAX cell, type =MAX( and then select the cells which you would like to include in your data range. Close parenthesis, 'Enter,' and you have the max value in that set of data."
Equals max left parenthesis B4:B16 right parenthesis is entered into cell B17.
Narrator: "Next we will repeat the process using MIN. We see that our max is 34,066,000,000, and our min is 17,829,000."
Equals min left parenthesis B4:B16 right parenthesis is entered into cell B18.
Narrator: "Our range is the difference between the two."
Equals B17 minus B18 is entered into cell B19.
Narrator: "Our range is 16,237,000,000. We can then repeat this process by dragging our formula across the cells. And we can actually drag several at the same time, and it will copy the formulas that are in the original cells across the row."
The bottom right corner of the formula cells in column B are dragged to column E to copy the formulas across each row.
Narrator: "Let me go ahead and bold these to make it easier to differentiate our data from our results."
Cells A17 to E19 are highlighted, the bold button is selected from the Font section of the Home tab.
Narrator: "We see that the range is 16. 2 billion for domestic sales, 25. 8 billion for international. The total is 40. 9 billion. And then, when we look at employees, we have a range of 23,000 between the largest and the smallest number of employees that have been employed over those 13 years. Note that range is not telling us anything about the growth in sales from start to finish, or the growth in employees from start to finish. It is simply telling us how large the difference is between whatever value is largest and whatever is smallest in a data set. In this video, we have demonstrated how to calculate range in Excel using the MAX and MIN functions."
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