At 03:41 PM 7/27/01 -0700, David Heiser wrote: >Lets not knock EXCEL for statistics. > >Most of the responses are biased, because they don't have to pay the >excessive cost of the software they are recommending. The EXCEL stat package >comes with Microsoft OFFICE, so in many, many situations, the stat software >is FREE. You can't beat that. sure, but somebody IS paying for that ... it's a hidden fee called tuition ... or, a new computer fee ... or something ... microsoft is not exactly giving this away ... totally of no cost to users ... now, let me take the CON side of EXCEL ... and sure, i admit i am biased ... but, it is not because of the excessive cost of software ... some decent stat packages that students can get ... either via student editions or, other programs from companies ... make getting an exceedingly better product ... for the price of almost any text used in an ONE accounting course ... example: you can download minitab ... full package ... for free for 30 days ... and, rent it for another 6 months ... for 26 dollars ... now, you might say well ... THEN what but, over that 7 months ... a student can easily see that a product designed specifically for statistical analysis ... is much better ... in all ways ... than this free (?) product ... that was never designed for statistical analysis in the first place in addition ... there are better tools ONline ... FREE ... for doing all kinds of analyses ... than EXCEL COST is a false issue! in addition, the message this sends to students is bad ... and that is ... it is not important AS A PROFESSIONAL ... to attempt to get the best tools you can ... for your occupation ... personally i find this approach to be detrimental to the students' BEST long run interest if a student from a business program were to land a job where statistical analysis was a major part of his or her job ... EXCEL will not cut it ... the potential employer will ask "... can you use SAS or SPSS ... or something comparable? " ... you canNOT say yes if all you have done is to use EXCEL i don't deny that EXCEL is popular ... and, it comes built in at many schools ... or computers ... and, access is given to faculty and students "free" ... but, this is still not a sufficient reason to say that it is good enough to pass off as a full featured ... time tested ... professional product ... THAT we should be encouraging our students to learn to use AND adopt as part of their professional set of tools ... of course, this is just my opinion ... i liken using EXCEL for doing statistical analysis to saying that since "notepad" is built in to windows 98 etc ... that let's just teach it ... but, while it is easy to use ... and works fine for rather informal written communications ... it is highly limited when it comes to doing professional word processing ... notepad is to good word processing capabilities as EXCEL is to good statistical processing capabilities 1. graphics in EXCEL are poor and highly limited 2. data management is primitive 3. the integration of correlated techniques is highly limited 4. the utility of working with many variables and doing interrelated analyses is very cumbersome 5. and the number of analytical routines is sparse and the list goes on dennis roberts, penn state university educational psychology, 8148632401 http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
