Wednesday, December 03, 2008

I am now babtised in the use of Excel for statistical analysis.

I never do like to use Excel for statistics because I can use much more powerful tools like SAS and R. Also I have been taught to prefer R and SAS because apparently they are more professional. In fact, I have also been taught to do analysis by hand because that gives the least black box approach. At any rate my present professor uses Excel to do the analysis of simulations so I used Excel.

I have two versions of the experiment and I had our programmers run it 10,000 times thus simulating a restaurant being open 10,000 days. I used Excel formulas to calculate averages, standard deviations and confidence intervals. I divided the confidence interval by 2 to give a half interval. I then did this for the first ten runs, the first 100 runs, the first 1000 runs and finally the whole 10,000 runs.

Then using Excel I made some tables to hold the results and copied and pasted these into Word. I used two fonts the standard Excel Mac X version default font for most of the work and then tried American Typewriter for the headings. I am learning typesetting for tables and charts at work in my development assignment. My development assignment is ending this week. It actually ends next Tuesday but I took Monday and Tuesday off work to write my final exam.

So I have now used Excel to do a simple statistical analysis for our term project. I should now move on to writing this up and getting ready to submit the final step of the project. The good thing now is the professor was very positive about our step three submission and step four is statistics which is what I have studied the most courses in so this step has a lot going in my favour.

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