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Unlocking the Power of Statistics With Excel

Posted by on Friday, June 7th, 2013

If you use statistics in your job, Excel is a great way to manage all those numbers. Whether you are a statistician or a market researcher, properly managed statistics can back up your claim.

Juggling Numbers

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Excel is the king and queen of statistics. Let’s just say the monarch. Of course, if you are compiling stats you may have to break them down by gender, age or any number of variables.

Many people who use statistics to prove their thesis, provide guidance or use them for planning, become frustrated by the limitations of Excel spreadsheets. For example, if you are chronically busy you don’t want to have to fiddle with little things like formatting the date and then having to reformat it again. Also, if you format a date as 12/4, some may read this as December 4th or April 12th. Different versions of Excel have different defaults for dates.

Create a Histogram

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If there is one thing required when using statistics, it is accuracy, or your entire project based on these figures could be affected.

Researchers often have assistants who do the data entry and it is very easy to make a mistake, especially if you are passing information back and forth, or providing your administrative assistant with PDF or Word files that require extreme attention to detail to ensure that numbers aren’t transposed or that information isn’t inputted incorrectly.

Tired workers can easily mix up data or put the wrong figures in the wrong cell.

By using a PDF to Excel converter, you, or your staff can use this innovative software to fulfill your mandate while making the job easier.

 

If you are managing a large research project, the information that you have to deal with can come from many different sources, in a variety of media. It can be overwhelming, and human error can skew the statistics and defeat the purpose.

Some researchers are resorting to double data entry, where you enter the data and then do it again, or have someone else do it and compare the results to search for discrepancies.

This is a great method to catch those errors but it is also time consuming and costly.

That is where using software comes into the picture. A PDF to Excel converter allows you to input hundreds of pages of data in an unbelievably short period of time.

Statistics

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If you want to use a second pair of eyes, you’ll have more financial resources to hire that person and more time to spend checking the quality of your work.

Take those questionnaires, that data from your colleague or those previous studies and have it become part of your project without the hassle or the worry of missing your deadline.