Product Description

Learn how to solve real-life business problems and generate professional reports that include spreadsheets and graphics by harnessing the power of Microsoft Excel for Windows 95. This book teaches readers how to use Excel - the industry standard software for spreadsheets - to do statistical analysis and the number-crunching that is often required in business. This book is ideal for anyone who finds themselves having to make recommendations, forecasts, or decisions based upon sets of real data. Even readers with no previous experience using computer spreadsheets will find this text's step-by-step approach and use of numerous screen shots make it easy to learn to use Excel in analyzing data sets. The authors have included a wide range of real-world examples to show how the skills the book teaches apply to a variety of business situations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1464675 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 503 pages

About the Author
Kenneth N. Berk (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is a professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Illinois State University and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. His recent work has focused on applied statistics and statistical computing. Professor Berk was editor of Software Reviews for the American Statistician for six years. He served as chair of the Statistical Computing Section of the American Statistical Association. He has twice co-chaired the annual Symposium on the Interface between Computing Science and Statistics.

Customer Reviews

A review by a statistics class (XP edition)
I use this book as the main text book for the first half of a class in statistics and research methods for students from a wide variety of social science and humanities backgrounds, with little formal statistics or mathematics background.

I surveyed my students with 5 questions about the book, with responses on a Likert scale (1=strongly disagree, 3=neutral, 5=strongly aggree. 17 students responded, which is a small enough sample size to caution applicability of results. The mean value of each response appears after the questions I asked.

1.The book was, overall, helpful in explaining statistical concepts. (Mean=2.73). Students would have appreciated more explanation and examples.
2.The book helped me to analyze data. (Mean=2.3)
3.The StatPlus AddIn was, overall, helpful in analyzing data. (Mean=3.76)
4.The StatPlus AddIn worked well on my computer. (Mean=3.7)
5.Overall, I would recommend this book to next year's class. (Mean=3.05)

Thus, overall, weighting each question equally, my students gave the book 3.12 stars.

As a professor, I give the book 4 stars. The organization of the book chapters fit well in an overview course, with one chapter assinged per week. The StatPlus AddIn is worth the cost of the book itself, as it expands the statistical capabilities of Excel without students needing to purchase additional software. There are a wide range of problems and example data sets which come with the book, applicable to a wide range of disciplines. A significant number of students had computer difficulties installing and running the StatPlus AddIn, so I would recommend to the company a support web page with FAQs, at the least.

Students with little preparation in mathematics or statiscs who need a good step-by-step guide to data analysis will find this book helpful, especially if they do the excercises at the end of the chapters. (The publishers should make the answers available to everyone, not just us instructors -- for those working on their own who want to check their work). However, students with some preparation in statistics or mathematics may be better served with a more advanced text.

Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel by Berk and Carey
As a statistics instructor, I found the book and software very helpful. To extract the software is a bit tricky - you need to read pages 8-10 and 76-77 to get the disk installed. Once installed, the Stat Plus Add-In adds extra tools, including a box plot and normal probability plot, that standard Excel does not have. My students use the software in a computer lab.

Data Analysis for "Non"-Scientists
I was browsing through a local bookstore for a guide to Excel specially tailored for science and engineering applications. I encountered this book and found it very interesting and detailed. It is written in plain English that conveys the message very well. For readers are looking for info about using Excel for statistics (pertaining to business, economics, and social science), this is the perfect book. Yet it does not extrapolate and contain all the necesaary info on science and engineering applications. I still recommend this book for non-scientists.