# 3.85 FAQ-323 How to perform column calculation over a sliding window, such as moving average or moving standard deviation?

Last Update: 4/26/2022

#### Use Built-in Moving/Rolling Functions

Origin provides several built-in functions that let you specify backward and/or forward window size:
Movavg, Emovavg, Mmovavg, Movcoef, Movrms, Movslope, Tmovavg, and Wmovavg.

For example, to use the Movavg function, in the Set Values dialog, do the following:

1. Select the column or cells where you want to put the result.
2. Select from menu Column: Set Column Value... to open the dialog (or press CTRL + Q from keyboard).
3. In the opened dialog, click Function: Statistics: Movavg(vd,back,forward) to auto-fill the movavg function in the column formula text box.
4. Replace vd with the range on which you want to compute a moving average.
5. Replace back with the backward offset respect to current position, and forward with the forward offset respect to current position.
6. Click the OK button.

#### Modify other functions to be Moving/Rolling Functions

You can use sub-ranges in your Set Column Value formula to specify a sliding window.

For example, to calculate the standard deviation over a window size of 11, you can specify sub-range in your formula, such as:

StdDev(A[i-5:i+5])
 Use the Formula: Load Sample menu in the Set Values dialog for examples on column value calculations.

Note: To calculate moving average on a plot, you can use Analysis: Signal Processing: Smoothing tool and set Method as Adjacent-Averaging.

Keywords:Moving, Rolling, Sliding, average, mean, standard deviation, std, SMA