

It is easily used to do a variety of calculations, includes a collection of statistical functions, and a Data Analysis ToolPak. Newly purchased computers often arrive with Excel already loaded. IntroductionĮxcel is probably the most commonly used spreadsheet for PCs. However when you are ready to do the statistical analysis, we recommend the use of a statistical package such as SAS, SPSS, Stata, Systat or Minitab.

Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses.Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly.The problems we encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas: We concluded that Excel is a poor choice for statistical analysis beyond textbook examples, the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. We used Excel to do some basic data analysis tasks to see whether it is a reasonable alternative to using a statistical package for the same tasks. University of Massachusetts School of Public Health
