We used this data to do some simple analyses and compared the results with a standard statistical package. The subjects are entered in the order that the data became available, so the data is not ordered in any particular way. We were unable to get a measurement for Y on the second subject, or on X for the last subject, so these cells are blank. X and Y are the values of two measurements on each subject. The first subject received Treatment 1, and had Outcome 1. However when you are ready to do the statistical analysis, we recommend the use of a statistical package such as SAS, SPSS, Stata, Systat or Minitab.Įach row of the spreadsheet represents a subject. Output is poorly organized, sometimes inadequately labeled, and there is no record of how an analysis was accomplished.Įxcel is convenient for data entry, and for quickly manipulating rows and columns prior to statistical analysis.
Many analyses can only be done on one column at a time, making it inconvenient to do the same analysis on many columns.Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses.Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly.The problems we encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas: We concluded that Excel is a poor choice for statistical analysis beyond textbook examples, the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. We used Excel to do some basic data analysis tasks to see whether it is a reasonable alternative to using a statistical package for the same tasks. University of Massachusetts School of Public Health Using Excel for Statistical Data Analysis - Caveats