Product Description

You too can understand the statistics of life, even if you're math-challenged!

What do you need to calculate? Manufacturing output? A curve for test scores? Sports stats? You and Excel can do it, and this non-intimidating guide shows you how. It demystifies the different types of statistics, how Excel functions and formulas work, the meaning of means and medians, how to interpret your figures, and more — in plain English.

• Getting there — learn how variables, samples, and probability are used to get the information you want

• Excel tricks — find out what's built into the program to help you work with Excel formulas

• Playing with worksheets — get acquainted with the worksheet functions for each step

• Graphic displays — present your data as pie graphs, bar graphs, line graphs, or scatter plots

• What's normal? — understand normal distribution and probability

• Hyping hypotheses — learn to use hypothesis testing with means and variables

• When regression is progress — discover when and how to use regression for forecasting

• What are the odds — work with probability, random variables, and binomial distribution

Open the book and find:

• Ten statistical and graphical tips and traps

• The difference between descriptive and inferential statistics

• Why graphs are good

• How to measure variations

• What standard scores are and why they're used

• When to use two-sample hypothesis testing

• How to use correlations

• Different ways of working with probability

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26969 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 504 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470454060
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Back Cover
Create graphs, develop estimates, and apply probability

Get the scoop on all of Excel's statistical tools and what they can do for you

If "permutation" sounds like something you shouldn't say around your grandmother and you read "margin of error" as "margin of terror," take heart! This easy-to-follow guide explains statistics in plain English and shows you how to use Excel charts, functions, samples, and correlations to make sense of it all — even if you're numerically challenged!

Discover how to

• Understand means, medians, and standard deviations
• Use Excel to give meaning to sets of numbers
• Draw conclusions from data
• Test your hypotheses
• Apply statistical concepts to real-world situations

About the Author

Joseph Schmuller, PhD, is a technical architect at Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Florida. A former member of the American Statistical Association, he has taught statistics at the undergraduate, honors undergraduate, and graduate levels, and has been honored with an award for excellence in teaching.

Customer Reviews

Excellent
This book is excellent for seasoned Excel users and people who were taught (but didn't learn) statistics in your average graduate school program. I have never seen statistical concepts so briefly and at the same time well explained. Actually applying the concepts adds another level of learning. I highly recommend this book.

More Than a Simple Spread Sheet
Excel is of course first and foremost a spreadsheet. They were designed to allow you to play what if senarios. You can change this part of the budget to see what the effect is over there.

But beyond the spread sheet functionality Excel has numerous functions and capabilities to do all kinds of analysis capabilities.

This book is on using these functions to perform a whole range of statistical functions. Not only does this book cover the functions themselves, but gives the background and description of what this particular kind of function is doing. Both numerical analysis and charting functions are included and in detail.

Don't skip the part in this book called the Part of Tens. This section in the For Dummies books often has some interesting points, but here the summation of statistical limitations is just great.

Excellent Reference, Not For Beginners.
I bought this book to help me with the statistical analyses involved with my senior dissertation at my university. I am a psychology major and I could use all the help I could get understanding the Results Sections in the literature. This book explains all kinds of statistics, including the very helpful ANOVA and regression analysis amongst many other. However, it doesn't explain very well when or why you use these statistics. They don't provide many examples of research or problems that require such analyses. This book is great for a step by step tutorial using Excel and handwriting statistics problems, and reading your data.... but unless you have an idea of what you're looking for in the first place, don't bother. I am totally ignorant to statistical analyses and coming into this book, I didn't know when to use ANCOVA or even what precisely it was demonstrating in relation to the research I am conducting... and I still only have a vague idea... Hopefully this will all be explained in course. But, this is a valued reference for all Excel users, without a doubt!!