Open the workbook by going to the File menu in Excel, or by double clicking on the Workingdataset.xls file. When you open this workbook you will see a number of worksheets - OECD Factbook data download, Summary Statistics, R&D Chart, GDP Chart, Derived and chart data.. Use the tabs at the bottom of the workbook to navigate through the worksheets and click on the red tab to view the OECD Factbook data download worksheet:

The OECD Factbook data download datasheet contains the time series data for Germany, UK, US and Japan on the following indicators;

Gross Domestic Product (GDP): GDP is a measure of the total economic activity of a country and is a key indicator of the economic health or otherwise of a nation. Note the GDP's in this datasets are all measured in the same units (Billions of US Dollars).

GDP Expenditure on Research and Development (R&D) Advanced economies compete technologically, and R&D expenditure relative to GDP is a key measure of government and private sector efforts to pursue this strategy.

These indicators were downloaded from the OECD Factbook 2007 under the 'Macroeconomic Trends' and 'Science and Technology' headings. You will learn how to access and download this freely available data later on.

In this first exercise, we are going to produce some basic summary descriptive statistics for the GDP data. Descriptive statistics are used to summarise the basic features of the sample and the data values, such as how many data points there are and the spread of the data values.

Select the Summary Statistics tab from the bottom of the worksheet:

We will first look at the mean for each country. The arithmetic mean or simple average is calculated by adding up all the values in each series and then dividing by the number of values. Excel has a function, AVERAGE that will calculate the mean for you.

Fill in the Mean for German GDP by selecting the cell B2 in the Summary Statistics sheet and typing =Average( into the cell.