Excel Environment

Since we will be using Excel for statistical analysis, we provide a brief overview of the Excel environment with particular emphasis on the latest versions of Excel (Excel 2007, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and 365) and the capabilities most useful for statistical analysis. Together with Excel’s online help facilities (accessible by pressing in Excel the F1 function key), this will provide you with sufficient background to carry out the analyses described in the remainder of this website.

Since Excel is so widely used, there is a wealth of information (books, websites, etc.) about Excel that you can consult if you would like to know more about how to use Excel. 

Topics

See also Excel Capabilities for additional information about a variety of Excel capabilities used for statistical analysis.

Finally, the descriptions of Excel’s Goal Seek and Solver capabilities are also useful.

References

Shimota, J.  (2021) Excel Exercises
https://excelexercises.com/

Custom Guide (2021) Excel cheat sheet
https://www.customguide.com/cheat-sheet/excel-cheat-sheet.pdf

16 thoughts on “Excel Environment”

  1. I loaded real-statistics which went fine. Then I used it for the non-central t and that went fine. I also made other edits (just formatting) to the excel spreadsheet prior to saving the workbook. The next time I try to open the workbook, all of my work related to the real-statistics function is gone and I don’t have the add-in. Do I have to do something special prior to saving the workbook? This is frustrating!

    Reply

    • James,
      You don’t have to do anything special to save the workbook.
      When you say that all your work related to the real statistics function is gone, do you mean that the formula using the function no longer appears or the value is some error value?
      Charles

      Reply

  2. Dear Charles, I have been using real stats for some time and getting added to it. So good! and it is getting better as I see. Since a couple of days I am having troubles in continuing using it as I describe now: I get the solver and the realstat add-in checked in the excel add-ins, then contrl+m to the realstat window open and now, when I click the “ok” button, a window with the message “run time error 424 required object” (or something expressing the same – I translated from portuguese) appears. Can you please help me correcting it? I have tried to reinstall realstats today to see if the problem is corrected but it does not. The message itself is a Microsoft Visual Basic error, if I am not wrong. thanks for your help

    Reply

  3. Charles,
    I am having issues getting Real Statistic to run. I am running Office 2016 with Excel 2016. I’ve followed all the instructions. Xrealstats.xlam appears in the Add-Ins. It is also checked in the Excel Add-Ins. Solver is also installed and checked. I have tried all the ways you have described to launch the program. Ctrl-m doesn’t launch the program. There is no Add-In ribbon along the top. I added the “Menu Commands” in the Quick Access Toolbar, but it doesn’t do anything either. Recommendations??
    Thanks very much for the help,
    bah

    Reply

    • Hi,

      I have the same issue.
      Try to uncheck from excel add-ins, press ok.
      Then open the add-in window again, check Xrealstats and press ok.

      For me, this makes an Add-in ribbon appear on top, in which you find Xrealstats. Also, the Xrealstat functions appear when you try typing them in a cell. But you have to do this procedure each time you open an excel file in which you want to use this add-in.

      Hope this helps,

      Seb

      Reply

  4. I followed all the directions for an installation on a macintosh excel version 16.23. Realstats shows up in the excel add in list under “tools/Excel add ins”. I turn the box “Realstats MAc 2016” on and then say OK. Everything seems to work fine. then when I go to the Addin Ribbon. there is nothing there. Solver is also turned on and so is Analysis Toolpack. Any recommendations of how to get this working?

    thank you.

    Reply

  7. I am trying to determine when a product will fail using basic statistics – situation – product is made up of 10 identical parts – 7 of the parts are old and will fail more quickly than the 3 new parts. How can I show how much longer the product will last if we increase the number of new parts. Know values – # of parts, expected life of parts.

    Reply

    • Pat,
      You would need to provide more information in order for me to answer your question more completely, but the basic idea is as follows:
      Suppose p1 = the probability that part 1 fails in a given time interval and p2 = the probability that part 2 fails in the same time interval, then the probability that the product consisting only of these two parts will fail in the same time interval is 1-(1-p1)(1-p2). This can be extended to additional parts. Additional analysis may depend on the failure rate distribution (e.g. exponential, Weibull). See the following webpages for more details:
      Exponential Distribution
      Weibull Distribution
      Charles

      Reply

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