missing values

[Steve]

How do you handle a large data set that has missing
observations for multiple x values (randomly). Some
statistical packages use a . Is there something like this
for Excel?

 

[Harlan Grove]

How do you handle a large data set that has missing
observations for multiple x values (randomly). Some
statistical packages use a . Is there something like this
for Excel?

No. Excel is most emphatically *NOT* a statistics package. The closest things in
Excel to missing value support are blank cells and #N/A, both of which cause
errors in regression and other statistics functions.

You'll need to sort your data ranges so that observations with missing values
are sorted to one end or the other of all observations, then use only the
nonmissing observations. That's the only way it works in Excel.