Statistical Tools in EXCEL
I have come across some course participants who are not aware of the fact that we can add a plug-in of Analysis ToolPak on the popular Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet. This tool package is very useful for statistical analysis. It uses appropriate statistical macro functions to calculate and display the results of your data analysis in an output table. Some tools even generate charts in addition to output tables.
To do so, you can simply open the Excel spreadsheet, first click the “File” tab, click “Options” , then click “Add-ins” which will show up a list of Inactive Application Add-ins under the “Manage” box. Check the “Analysis ToolPak” check box and click “OK”. The spreadsheet will automatically install this statistical package for you. You can find the “Data Analysis” tab when you click the “Data” tab on the spreadsheet tool bar as shown below:
When the “Data Analysis” button is clicked, the menu as shown below shows up. You can just choose the relevant statistical tool you want to work on by select it with a click.
The regular statistical tools useful in analyzing data collected from chemical experiments are analysis of variance (ANOVA), linear regression correlation, descriptive statistics, plotting histogram, F-tests for variances and various Student’s t-tests.
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