Course Overview

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.  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.  The problems we encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas:

• Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly.
• Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses.
• Many analyses can only be done on one column at a time, making it inconvenient to do the same analysis on many columns.