Joseph Schmuller - Statistical Analysis with Excel For Dummies

Although Excel hasn’t added any new statistical functions, the Windows version (of 365) has an exciting new feature called linked data, which enables you to look up information about a variety of topics (movies, universities, stocks, and more) without leaving Excel. (Exciting as it is, we won’t be working with this one.)

The Mac and iPad have added Data from Pictures. As its name suggests, this feature looks at a picture of a data table and puts the data into a spreadsheet. I cover this topic in Chapter 2.

A new feature in Windows and Mac called Analyze Data offers insights about your data. I cover this feature in Chapter 2as well.

An add-in called XLMiner Analysis ToolPak mimics Excel’s Analysis Toolpak (an extensive set of analytical tools) and adds logistic regression, which, as I mentioned, I cover in Chapter 21.

This isn’t an introductory book about Excel or about Windows, Mac, or iPad, so I'm assuming that you

Know how to use your computer: I don’t spell out the details of pointing, clicking, selecting, and other basic actions.

Have Excel (Microsoft 365 subscription) installed on your machine and can work along with the examples: I don’t walk you through the steps of Excel installation. Incidentally, I work with the 32-bit version — it seems to get the updates more quickly than the 64-bit version does. Excel 2021 should work for most of the examples, but the subscription version receives the latest updates.

Have worked with Excel: I don’t go into the essentials of worksheets and formulas. I do fill you in on a few Excel fundamentals in Chapter 1, however.

If you don't know much about Excel, consider looking into Greg Harvey's excellent Excel books in the For Dummies series.

As is the case with all For Dummies books, icons appear all over the place. Each one is a little picture in the margin that lets you know something special about the paragraph it sits next to.

This icon points out a hint or a shortcut that can help you in your work and make you an all-around better human being.

This one points out timeless wisdom to take with you long after you finish this book, young Jedi.

Pay attention to this icon — it's a reminder to avoid an action that may gum up the works for you.

This icon indicates material you can blow right past if statistics and Excel aren't your passion.

You can start the book anywhere, but here are a few hints. Want to learn the foundations of statistics? Turn the page. Introduce yourself to Excel's statistical features? That's Chapter 2. Want to start with graphics? Hit Chapter 3. For anything else, find it in the table of contents or in the index and go for it.

In addition to what you’re reading right now, this book comes with a free, access-anywhere Cheat Sheet that will help you quickly use the tools I discuss. To find this Cheat Sheet, visit www.dummies.com and search for Statistical Analysis with Excel For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the Search box. And don’t forget to check out the bonus content on this book’s companion website, at http://www.dummies.com/go/statisticalanalysiswexcelfd5e .

If you’ve read any of the previous editions, welcome back!

If not, it’s nice to meet you.

Part 1

IN THIS PART …

Find out about Excel’s statistical capabilities

Explore how to work with populations and samples

Test your hypotheses

Understand errors in decision-making

Determine independent and dependent variables

Chapter 1

IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing statistical concepts

Generalizing from samples to populations

Getting into probability

Making decisions

Understanding important Excel fundamentals

The field of statistics is all about decision-making — decision-making based on groups of numbers. Statisticians constantly ask questions: What do the numbers tell us? What are the trends? What predictions can we make? What conclusions can we draw?

To answer these questions, statisticians have developed an impressive array of analytical tools. These tools help us make sense of the mountains of data that are out there waiting for us to delve into, and to understand the numbers we generate in the course of our own work.

Because intensive calculation is often part and parcel of the statistician’s tool set, many people have the misconception that statistics is about number crunching. Number crunching is just one small step on the path to sound decisions, however.

By shouldering the number crunching load, software increases your speed of travel down that path. Some software packages are specialized for statistical analysis and contain many of the tools that statisticians use. Although not marketed specifically as a statistical package, Excel provides a number of these tools, which is why I wrote this book.

I just said that number crunching is a small step on the path to sound decisions. The most important part are the concepts statisticians work with, and that’s what I talk about for most of the rest of this chapter.

On election night, TV commentators routinely predict the outcome of elections before the polls close. Most of the time they’re right. How do they do that?

The trick is to interview a sample of voters right after they cast their ballots. Assuming the voters tell the truth about whom they voted for, and assuming the sample truly represents the population, network analysts use the sample data to generalize to the population of voters.

This is the job of a statistician — to use the findings from a sample to make a decision about the population from which the sample comes. But sometimes those decisions don’t turn out the way the numbers predict. History buffs are probably familiar with the memorable photo of President Harry Truman holding up a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the famous, but incorrect, headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” after the 1948 election. Part of the statistician’s job is to express how much confidence they have in the decision.