The Microsoft product Excel is a very popular and useful spreadsheet program.
WHY YOU SHOULD AVOID EXCEL
The Microsoft product Excel is a very popular and
useful spreadsheet program. Excel provides random number generators and
functions to generate means, standard deviations, and minima and maxima of a
set of numbers in a spreadsheet. It also has a data analysis toolkit as an
add-on option. The toolkit provides many standard statistical tools, including
regression and analysis of variance.
Many universities, particularly business schools,
have considered using Excel for routine statistical analyses and as a tool to
teach statistics to undergraduate classes. However, statisticians have
discovered numerical instabilities in many of the algorithms. In some versions
of Excel, even calculations of means and standard deviations could be incorrect
because of blank rows or columns treated as zero in value instead of being
ignored. The pseudorandom number generators that are used in Excel are also
known to be faulty. Microsoft has not fixed many of the problems that have been
pointed out to them. For all of these reasons, we think it is better to export
Excel data files to other packages such as SAS before doing even routine
statistical analyses.
Academic institutions are tempted to use Excel for
statistical analyses. Nowa-days, PCs are owned and used by the schools
themselves as well as most of the community. Excel is automatically
preinstalled in most of the computers sold to universities and their students.
Some universities have site licenses for the distribution of well-known
software products. We recommend that you use Excel for typi-cal spreadsheet
applications and for graphics such as bar charts, pie charts, and scat-ter
plots but not for statistical analyses.
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