Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
practicalstats.com
Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#2The other reason to not use Excel for stats? It's virtually impossible to reproduce your work unless you documented every step in some other format. Excel is easily one of the worst tools you can use if you ever need to refer back to/redo your original work at any point in the future or if you need to be able to validate your result with any confidence. Yea I know there are some people who are freaking magicians with VBA who can "fix" many of the problems listed, but that doesn't absolve excel of its statistical sins.
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#3Considering Microsoft recent involvment with R I have the crazy hope that future versions of Excel will be shipped with R as a scripting language.
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#4The other reason to not use Excel for stats? It's virtually impossible to reproduce your work unless you documented every step in some other format. Excel is easily one of the worst tools you can use if you ever need to refer back to/redo your original work at any point in the future or if you need to be able to validate your result with any confidence. Yea I know there are some people who are freaking magicians with…
I think that's where R stats package (R Project) really shines, I love the command line console that displays every input / action so you have a track record of what you did. Used it for T-tests, linear regression, ANOVA, MANOVA. For those working in biological / environmental science fields, I would definitely recommend it.
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#5How does LibreOffice compare?
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#6Considering Microsoft recent involvment with R I have the crazy hope that future versions of Excel will be shipped with R as a scripting language.
There is an Excel addin (RExcel) that allows the use of R from within Excel. But it's proprietary.
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#7> "Changes in Excel 2010 have improved its use for statistics considerably. For earlier versions of Excel, however, the answer is generally ‘No’. The following refers to versions prior to 2010 (2011 on the Mac)."
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#8How does LibreOffice compare?
It's just as unsuitable. But there are plenty of open source packages that R the right tool for the job...
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#9The other reason to not use Excel for stats? It's virtually impossible to reproduce your work unless you documented every step in some other format. Excel is easily one of the worst tools you can use if you ever need to refer back to/redo your original work at any point in the future or if you need to be able to validate your result with any confidence. Yea I know there are some people who are freaking magicians with…
I think that's where R stats package (R Project) really shines, I love the command line console that displays every input / action so you have a track record of what you did. Used it for T-tests, linear regression, ANOVA, MANOVA. For those working in biological / environmental science fields, I would definitely recommend it.
There is a free R course on Codeschool if anyone wants to try it for an hour or two. It's fun.
Re: Is Microsoft Excel an Adequate Statistics Package?
#10I disagree. Where I work, we have one person that does all the hedging, price calculations and other financial modeling and he only uses Excel. The only practical downsides to his use of Excel it's that he doesn't have direct database access so we generally need to create the initial reports to give him the data and secondly Excel can only hold a little over 2M rows.