Customer Reviews

Data Analysis with Spreadsheets (with CD-ROM)

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Quite possibly, the typical Social Work student is not from a strong mathematical or computing background. But she is often expected to understand and apply common statistical analysis on data, especially if she is a graduate student.

Patterson offers a relatively easy approach for her to acquire this knowledge. By using spreadsheets, like Microsoft Excel. Or, for that matter, she might even use the free OpenOffice spreadsheet. These now come with many common statistical functions, to compute mean, standard deviation and other metrics. Plus, a spreadsheet can often display tabulated data, in various graphical forms, like bar graphs or pie charts. There is no need to learn a language to find the statistics, and another language to graph the results.

Another benefit is that the spreadsheets are now widely available on many personal computers. Hence, what she learns here can be easily applied elsewhere.