The standard error of the mean is another common way to describe the deviation from the mean and the frequency of this deviation but it also takes into account the size of your data set. However, if you look closely at standard error and standard deviation, you will notice that standard error has taken the sample size into account twice . In reality, this is statistics at its worst. Standard error is a statistical analysis of one set of data treated as if you had actually repeated the same experiment many times and gotten a range of means. In other words, standard error is a statistical approach that attempts to look at the variance of these imaginary range of means and determine the variance of these means.
Many scientists use standard error to make their data look better than it really is.
98 W have decided to give you the quick and dirty version that is much easier than older versions of this lab. Once you have obtained results in Excel, you will use Cricket Graph to graph your results. You could use Excel for graphing, but putting error bars in Excel is difficult to do. When entering the same number many times, you can save yourself some time with a short cut. Enter the number once, highlight that number, then click and drag the small box in the lower right hand corner to fill as many boxes as you need with the same number.