Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook

Chapter 5. Statistical Analysis

Introduction

As you’ve seen in Chapter 3, it’s fairly easy to import data into Excel for analysis. Certainly, performing statistical analyses on such data would be very convenient to do in Excel. Indeed, Excel has dozens of built-in spreadsheet functions that allow you to perform all sorts of statistics calculations. The Analysis ToolPak add-in also contains several other statistical tools. Moreover, being able to visualize your data as discussed in Chapter 4 makes Excel especially convenient for certain analyses.

Excel’s help documents contain descriptions of and syntax for all of its statistical functions; there are dozens of them, covering all sorts of calculations from descriptive statistics to significance tests. The help topic “Statistical Functions” lists all such functions, providing links to more details on the syntax and use of each function, along with examples in many cases.

The help topic “About Statistical Analysis Tools” also provides information on the use of the analysis tools available in the Analysis ToolPak add-in. To make sure you have the Analysis ToolPak add-in available in your version of Excel, select Tools from the main menu bar and see if the Data Analysis menu option appears toward the bottom of the Tools menu. If not, select Tools → Add-Ins from the main menu bar and select the Analysis ToolPak option from the list.

In this chapter I’m going to show you how to use Excel to perform standard statistical calculations. I don’t ...