Biostatistics For Dummies

Chapter 4

Counting on Statistical Software

In This Chapter

Surveying statistical software (commercial and free) for personal computers

Performing statistics on handheld devices (like calculators, tablets, and smartphones)

Doing statistical calculations on the web

Using paper calculators (yes, there are such things!)

You may be surprised that throughout this book, I tell you not to do statistical calculations by hand. With computing power so readily available and with such an abundance of statistical software at your disposal — much of it free — there’s just no good reason to put yourself through the misery of mind-numbing calculations and waste your precious time only to (almost certainly) come up with the wrong answer because of some inadvertent error in arithmetic. Just as you would never seriously consider using long division to calculate your car’s miles per gallon, you should never consider calculating a correlation coefficient, a t test, or a chi-square test by hand.

In this chapter, I describe some of the many alternatives available to you for performing statistical calculations ...