Business and Financial Statistics Using Minitab 12 and Microsoft Excel 97

Book excerpt: The personal computer has made statistical analysis easier and cheaper. Previously, statistical analysis was difficult for many reasons. Two of the reasons were: (1) statistical analysis was slow and tedious because calculations were done by hand; (2) it was costly because it was done on mainframes and mainframe time was expensive. This book discusses statistical analysis using two personal computer software packages, Minitab 12 and Microsoft Excel 97, Minitab was chosen because it is powerful and is one of the more user-friendly statistical software packages. Microsoft Excel 97 was selected because it is one of the most important software packages to learn and most companies use Microsoft Excel. Excel is a software package that is not dedicated to statistical analysis like Minitab, but it has many statistical features and a very powerful development environment for writing customized statistical analysis. The book is organized in a textbook format. Each chapter discusses statistical conceptsand illustrates the use of Minitab and/or Excel. Often it becomes necessary to write macros (programs) in order to do specific statistical analysis. This books prints the codes of the macros for the reader to use and study. This is valuable because usually the difficult part is how to write the code. What the reader will find after studying this book is that statistical analysis will become more fun because he will have more time doing statistical analysis and make less statistical calculations.