Business Statistics For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Have you always been scared to death of statistics? You and just about everyone else! The equations are extremely intimidating, and the terminology sounds so … boring.

Why, then, is statistics so important? All business disciplines can be analyzed with statistical principles. Statistics make it possible to analyze real-world problems with actual data so that we can understand if our marketing strategy is really working, or how much a company should charge for its products, or any of a million other practical business questions.

Without a formal framework for analyzing these types of situations, it would be impossible to have any confidence in our results. This is where the science of statistics comes in. Far from being an overbearing collection of equations, it is a logical framework for analyzing practical business problems with real-world data.

This book is designed to show you how to apply statistics to practical situations in a step-by-step manner so that by the time you’re done, you’ll know as much about statistics as people with far more education in this area!

About This Book

All business degrees require at least some statistics courses, and there’s a good reason for that! All business disciplines are empirical by nature, meaning that they need to analyze actual data to be successful. The purpose of this book is to:

• Give you the principles on which statistical analysis is based
• Provide you with many worked-out examples of these principles so that you can ...