Excel is a good way to get a feel and comfort with the data. You can even try with statistics or numbers you are familiar with, maybe each day's drive time or miles to work to use the standard deviation function. Knowing the mean and standard deviation (and that a distribution is normal) allows us to do some neat things with statistics that we will be learning in coming weeks. These will serve as an important base. This Standard Deviation website is a good site to help make things understandable