Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program that offers some simple statistical tools. Excel is a convenient tool for statistical analysis since it is available on most computers. To use the statistical tools, the Data Analysis Toolpack must be installed.
Excel – as a statistical analysis program – has been criticized. See Eva Goldwater . Specifically,
- Different techniques require different organizational schemes for the data, so the data in the spreadsheet needs to be reorganized as different techniques are applied to the data
- Some techniques can only be applied to a single column of data, requiring the technique to be run separately for each column of data
- The reliability of Excel's statistical methods has been called into question.