ABSTRACT
This chapter starts by showing how Excel can be used as a simple way of looking at patient records. It tells about how to monitor levels of attendance at developmental checks, how to monitor the uptake of immunisations, how to produce a quantitative performance measure. Excel makes use of the concept of data lists. A list is a column with a title in the first row and data in each of the other rows. The List facility where Excel identifies each column by the label in the first row allows us to use the sort function to sort data into ascending or descending order. The standard deviation is less likely to be there than the average. There are four functions for the standard deviation in Excel: STDEV and STDEVP giving the sample and population standard deviations respectively, and each come in standard (STDEV/STDEVP) and deluxe version (STDEV A/STDEVPA).
