Excel® 2007 Bible

Chapter 38. Analyzing Data with the Analysis ToolPak

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

• The Analysis ToolPak: An overview

• Using the Analysis ToolPak

• Meeting the Analysis ToolPak tools

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Although Excel was designed primarily for business users, people in other disciplines, including education, research, statistics, and engineering, use it as well. One way that Excel addresses these nonbusiness users is with its Analysis ToolPak add-in. However, many features in the Analysis ToolPak are valuable for business applications as well.

The Analysis ToolPak: An Overview

The Analysis ToolPak is an add-in that provides analytical capability that normally isn’t available.

New Feature

In previous versions of Excel, the Analysis ToolPak add-in included many additional worksheet functions. In Excel 2007, these worksheet functions are built into Excel and no longer require the Analysis ToolPak add-in.

These analysis tools offer many features that may be useful to those in the scientific, engineering, and educational communities—not to mention business users whose needs extend beyond the normal spreadsheet fare.

This section provides a quick overview of the types of analyses that you can perform with the Analysis ToolPak. This chapter covers each of the following tools:

• Analysis of variance (three types)

• Correlation

• Covariance

• Descriptive statistics

• Exponential smoothing

• F-Test

• Fourier analysis

• Histogram

• Moving average

• Random number generation

• Rank and percentile

• Regression

• Sampling

• t-Test (three types) ...