Applications of Microsoft Excel in Statistical Methods

The evolution of computer science has revolutionized almost every field of our life. In the mid of the twentieth century, computer was considered as a tool for fast calculations. A shift from the DOS operating system to the Windows operating system in the last decade of the twentieth century has made the computer a multitasking device with wider applications. The size of the computer has reduced many fold with tremendous increase in its applications. At present a computer has very high level of artificial intelligence with capability of high-speed calculations and execution of input commands. The microprocessors of present-day computers are having multicore configurations. We have now multimedia computers capable of handling audio and video inputs and outputs. Internet technology has revolutionized the communication services. All computer literates are well-versed with the use of Windows operating system and Microsoft Office (MS Office) tools on a variety of computing devices. Microsoft Excel is an outstanding software platform of MS Office. It has great applications in statistical analysis in every field wherever we need statistical evaluation for assessing significance of research pursuits or control of quality. Microsoft Excel application of the MS Office has inbuilt provision for designing all sorts of graphics for presentation of data. We can arrange our data in tabulated forms in ascending or descending order, find out the average (mean) and standard deviation (sd, s, or σ), and, with thorough training, do statistical analysis and verify the results of statistical analysis done by manual methods of statistical analysis as deliberated in previous chapters this book. Calculations can be done quite quickly and accurately using Excel worksheet. An additional use of Excel is as a generator of statistical tables. There are built-in functions to calculate percentage points or p-values for many distributions of interest in statistical models. The use of “Excel Worksheet Functions for Statistics” solves all statistical problems.