Customer Reviews

Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft Excel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

On the positive side, this book has many excellent case studies and examples. It is well written and interesting. However, I was disappointed, as I was expecting use of Excel to rigorously solve decision making and data analysis problems. The focus of the book is mostly traditional statistics solved using a group of commercial add-ins for Excel. If this is what you want, then the book would get five stars. However, for data analysis and decision making, I think a more thorough treatment using Excel without relying so much on the add-ins would have been appropriate.

This book was put together in the same 'spirit' as previous other Winston books; good examples, well thought out attack approaches; as well as a good summary of all the types of problems encountered in the text! I have several other of Winston books, so I'm reasonably happy with his work! I am growing a little frustrated with winston et al. over the fact that they offer no solutions or answers to the many exercise problems contained throughout the text. I don't think Winston realizes that professionals outside of the classroom are buying these books and don't have the luxury of a professor sharing answers to the problems. This is where I think he can improve. The software addition, from palisades was an excellent addition to the text! I had already owned many of the commercial versions but have found that the suite, provided with the text, was just as robust as my retail versions.

The book itself is an exteremely good source of theory and problems. However, accompanying software is a reason for many disappointments. There are undocumented bugs and compatibility issues. Some supporting material for the book is still not available and customer support could have been better.

Finally MBA probability/statistics course and MS Excel have been unified in one textbook. The accompanying software is great, especially Decision Tree (probably the only Excel-based software for decision making). Students like business-oriented excersises in the book. Highly recommended.

Just purchased the book as a tool for MBA classes. However, after installing the accompanying CD ROM add-ons I had problems accessing MS Office programs. A critical .DLL file was modified by the program during my installation. I think the program was made to run with MS Excel 97. Another suggestion for the author is to include an answers CD ROM for the problems contained in the text so that students and professionals can check their work.

The text book is great. I have many of Winston's other books and they are all great. The Palisade stuff works just fine. However, the StatPro Addin that accompanies this text does not work with MS Excel 2000. I contacted the IT guy that the authors directed me to--he was stumped. He just gave up and suggested I return my book for a refund because he could not figure out it out. Again, the book is great but the StatPro Addin sucks!

I am a Reliability Engineer trying to learn more about Risk analysis.

The written part of the book seems fantastic, a lot of practical examples that we can use in real world, sure we all know that excel is limited and the use of Add-ins seems to be a very good way to manage that.

I bought a used copy of the book which came with 2 Cds but without the password and key to install the DecisionTools.
Does anybody know who should I contact to get that information ? Any help is very much appreciated...

Regards,
to All.

I find the text and software a useful set of tools. It assumes familiarity with basic statistics and Excel, and builds on them to develop a powerfull ability to analize data and make decisions from it. I experienced no trouble with the software install or operation.

As a past student of Dr. Zappe's at the University of Florida who used a Dr. Winston book in 1992, I would have to say that it weighs more thus increasing the strenths and size of my left bicep and foreman forcing poor alignment of my spine.