Statistical Analysis with Excel For Dummies, 5th Edition

Appendix B

Tips for Teachers (and Learners)

IN THIS Appendix

Excel as a teaching tool

Augmenting analyses

Simulating data

Extracting data from graphs

By now, I’m sure it’s clear to you that Excel is a wonderful tool for managing, manipulating, and analyzing data. One of Excel’s assets is its immediacy: As soon as you click OK, you see results.

This immediacy is also the foundation of a tool that can illuminate understanding as well as it manipulates and calculates. This appendix gives you a couple of ways to utilize Excel as a teaching tool, to help either students or yourself. Perhaps you’ll come up with some other ways.

Augmenting Analyses Is a Good Thing

Students sometimes look at the output of a data analysis tool and don’t have a good idea about where the numbers came from. Excel is ideally suited to solve that problem.

When I teach a statistical technique, I often use Excel to augment an analysis. That is, I use Excel for additional calculations on the data and then connect these results to the results of the analysis. The objective is to give students a deeper understanding ...