Doing Statistics with Excel 97
Preface
To The Student:
Data! Data! Data! It is everywhere and growing at an incredible rate. As our computer technology allows us to capture, store and retrieve more and more data, we must be able to transform that data into information. The information can then be used to make business decisions at all levels ranging from day-to-day decisions to short-term decisions to long-term strategic planning decisions. We can no longer compete internationally by making decisions based solely on experience and intuition. We must be able to see the information in the data.
This workbook is designed to help you learn how to see the valuable information in data. Each chapter is designed to allow you to explore a single statistical concept by investigating a data set. The situations which led to the collection of the data sets are based on actual consulting experiences of the authors.
It becomes quickly obvious that you can not investigate a data set without the assistance of a computer package. The computer package utilized in this workbook is known as Microsoft Excel 97. The commands necessary to use this package are explained in each chapter.
To The Instructor:
This workbook is designed to be used by students enrolled in a basic course in Statistics. It is built around the premise that students must Do Statistics in order to truly understand the statistical concepts. Thus, each chapter reinforces a topic from a standard statistics course. It is expected that the student can work independently or as a member of a team of students.
The workbook is self-contained in that all of the instructions needed to use the software are explained in the appropriate chapter.
Each chapter contains two types of exercises: (1) exercises to help the student learn the command structure of Excel 97and (2) exercises to help the students see the statistical concepts in action. The chapter is motivated by an actual problem drawn from the authors consulting experiences. There is one data set for each chapter which is tied to the motivating problem. Each of the datasets is on the disk which accompanies this workbook. The data set is then explained and the remainder of each chapter is dedicated to two major goals:
(1) to provide the student with detailed command instructions for using Excel 97 to accomplish the desired statistical analysis;
and
(2) to provide the student with a set of structured exercises designed to direct the students statistical thinking in order to reinforce the statistical tool of the chapter.
Statistical cases are explored in Chapters 4 through 15. Chapter 2 provides an introduction to Windows 95. Chapter 3 explains basic Excel 97 commands.