To put it very briefly: I couldn't agree more :) Apparently, the wrong impression from my post was that I recommended Excel for statistical analysis - AAMAF, I've never ever used it for "serious" research purposes myself. (I have, though, produced some charts published in sci. journals with it, and not because I didn't have or wasn't able too use many other tools.)
I did recommend Excel for teaching, though. And since yesterday, I've tried to give it some more ordered thought, namely, there must be some "magic" to Excel. I think it's about motivation - or else there wouldn't be so many so different people producing all these seemingly impossible wonderful applications and charts and add-ins with Excel, and I wouldn't be able to spark enthousiasm for careful and systematic data collection, processing (to avoid the term "analysis" in the statistical sense) and presentation with Excel in people previously detesting such "menial work", ranging from elderly ladies accountants with high school education to top-class nuclear physicists with post-doc. And teaching is, to simplify, all about motivation - both of the students and the teacher. But what is it so "motivating" about Excel? Well, one can easily think of <challenging but reachable goals>, <dynamics> (you literally work hard driving the mouse through all selection and clicking :), <colourfulness>, <aesthetic appeal>, <abstract concepts, be it interest rate, squared deviation or likelihood, literally materialising before one's very eyes, cell by cell>, <kind comments popping up to help you enter the right data in the right place> etc. Of particular importance, at least for a more advanced user, may be a kind of an "ugly duck turning into swan" effect of transforming a horrible chart produced with default settings into something complex yet ellegant in accordance with Tufte's principles. Educational psychologists with statistical inclination out there, how about an article about this? Or statisticians with psychological education, say in Jnl of Stats Education? (Not that there haven't been serious and comprehensive articles about the role of spreadsheets in stats eduaction - actually, this must be a title of one, or else it wouldn't have come to my mind as a phrase.) OK, too much babble from me as it is. About Excel and other things. Cheers, Gaj Vidmar . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
