Customer Reviews

Statistics for Managers Using Microsoft Excel and Student CD Package (5th Edition)

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

 

 

The book is very confusing. There is a lot of information the book does not explain how to access. For example , some exercises refer to PH grade assist. This is not described in the book. I never found it. I barely have time to study the contents of the chapters, much less how the book works. In addition, breakdown of equations are also confusing. I had to refer to a previous statistic book from a pre-grad course I took for better explanations.

The Statistics material presented in this book is good. But the Excel Companion sections are too wordy. The instructions for using Excel should have been written as bullet points.
The following items are not clear:
(1) Exporting a pivot table as an independent worksheet
(2) Creating new columns from a pivot table.

This textbook is dedicated to solving statistics problems using MS Excel. It covers the following on statistics:

1)Descriptive statistics
2)Probability (Binomial, Poisson, Hypergeometric etc)
3)Normal Distribution
4)Confidence interval
5)Hypothesis testing
6)ANOVA
7)Chi Square
8)Regression (linear, multiple)
9)Forecasting and decision making

The covers how to solve statistics problems using conventional (using a calculator) method as well. But the focus is on utilizing Excel's many but somewhat limited statistical functions and Data Analysis pack.

The explanations of statistical concepts are merely decent and are very dry. I would recommend "Humongous Book of Statistics Problems" or "Statistics for People Who Thinks They Hate Statistics" for better explanations of statistical concepts.

Most of the problems in this book are very redundant. At least 50% of problems are almost exact copies (questions included) of other problems but with different sets of Excel data. But the best part of this book is the CD-ROM which provides the Cxcel data sets for statistical analysis and problem solving. If you want to practice using Excel to resolve statistical problems, then I recommend this book. Conversely, unless you can obtain the contents of the CD-ROM (should not be hard to do since they contain mostly Excel Data sets), I would not purchase this book without the CD-ROM.

The biggest disappoint for me is this book's lack of specific details on how to use Excel. For example, the book excludes explanations some (it covers only the major ones) of the Data Analysis's outputs. Another major omission is a detailed instruction on how to use Excel for Quadratic Regressions. I had to search the internet for that information.

One pleasant surprise is the book's detailed explanation of regression (linear, multiple regression, confidence level etc). The book dedicates around 200 pages to the topic of regression and it is covered well (with some loopholes in Excel usage). If you want to know how to utilize Excel to perform regression, this book should provide good insights.

This is an excellent book for Managers or anyone studying statistics.Excel 2007 is being used extensively here which is a requirement for all stats students. There are some documentation errors or bugs with the calculations but they are minore. I hope the authors will rectify them in the next version.

My professor chose this book for an INTRO statistics class and it is clearly not an intro book. It is written terribly!

One star to many. This is an awful book for both statistics, excel and the price.

When they wrote this they should have just placed the excel material in the back of the book, and focused more on the material which is disorganized. The book jump around and should of been more methodical.
There are far better text like Statistical techniques in business and economics or even business statistics examples. Which I found more helpful and used in my business statistic class.

I had this book for an undergraduate Introduction to Statistics class and it was absolutely horrible.
The book was written by statistician for statistician, not for an undergrad who just started studying Statistics.

My class studied only 10 chapters out of 18. Each chapter has about 10 parts but most of the time we read only the first 3-4 parts.

The formulas in the book were very hard to look up because there was no legend next to them. The legends are only available at the first part of the chapter, next to the first 1-2 formulas in that chapter.

The examples in the book didn't appear very appealing and practical and were difficult to understand.

In chapter 9, there was a typo with Excel, where the Excel table says Null Hypothesis p = when p should be pi (the Greek letter) but overall, Excel was very well used.

I recommend using Statistical Analysis For Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Statistics as reference if you have no previous knowledge of Statistics, a very confusing professor, and this textbook.

Though I have not yet gone through the entire textbook, it does appear to be strongly oriented toward business managers. I actually purchased this book for review since I already had a graduate level statistics class about 10 years ago. I like this book because it teaches business cases. Also, the emphasis on using MS Excel was a big reason why I chose this book. One negative is that the quality of the manufacturing of this textbook is not great. I noticed a defect soon after recieving the product. However, I chose to live with the defect rather than send it back to the manufacturer.

I have to say that I was underwhelmed with the condition of my purchase. I bought a used book that was listed as being in "good" condition. However, when I received the book, it was in less than good condition. The spine was broken, some of the pages were becoming detached from the binding, and it was missing the accompanying CD (I recall it saying it came with CD). If this information had been provided, I never would have bought this book from this seller. Further, I keep getting spammed from the seller's e-mail address.