The Ribbon showed up in Excel 2007 and is still with us in Excel 2013. The few changes that did occur had to do primarily with how functions behaved when the user stress-tested them using extreme values or in very unlikely situations. Very little statistical functionality changed between Excel 97 and Excel 2003. You do not need to have taken courses in statistics to use this book.Īs to Excel itself, it matters little whether you’re using Excel 97, Excel 2013, or any version in between.
The material assumes knowledge of nothing more complex than how to calculate an average. This book moves on to basic statistics, such as averages and ranges, and only then to intermediate statistical methods such as t-tests, multiple regression, and the analysis of covariance. The book starts out with a discussion of different ways to measure things-by categories, such as models of cars, by ranks, such as first place through tenth, by numbers, such as degrees Fahrenheit-and how Excel handles those methods of measurement in its worksheets and its charts. How much background in statistics do you need to get value from this book? My intention is that you need none. They have their uses, and Excel provides them as statistical functions, but my picking and choosing forced me to ignore them-at my peril, probably-and to use the space saved for material on more bread-and-butter topics such as statistical regression. You shouldn’t expect to find discussions of, say, the Weibull function or the lognormal distribution here. The idea in both that book and this one is to identify a topic in statistical (or business) analysis discuss the topic’s rationale, its procedures, and associated issues and only then get into how it’s carried out in Excel. Instead, I take an approach that seemed to work well in an earlier book of mine, Business Analysis with Excel. To shoehorn statistics and Excel into 400 pages or so takes some picking and choosing.įurthermore, I did not want this book to be an expanded Help document, like one or two others I’ve seen. In 2001, I co-authored a book about Excel (no statistics) that ran to 750 pages. The text used in the first statistics course I took was about 600 pages, and it was purely statistics, no Excel. The problem is that it’s a huge amount of material to cover in a book that’s supposed to be only 400 to 500 pages. It’s been a struggle, but at last I’ve got it out of my system, and I want to start by talking here about the reasons for some of the choices I made in writing this book. Finally, I talked Pearson into letting me write it for them.īe careful what you ask for. But I didn’t, although I knew I wanted to. There was no reason I shouldn’t have already written a book about statistical analysis using Excel. Some third partyĪdd-ins (such as those linked below) attempt to provide similarįunctionality however, they may not be free.Statistical Analysis: Microsoft Excel 2013
This functionality was removed in Office 2008. To access the tools, click Tools and then Solver. To activate statistical analysis tools, click Tools,Īnd then Add-ins. This will create a "Data Analysis" section within the
If you see a prompt stating that the Analysis Toolpak is notĬurrently installed on your computer, click Yes to install.