Buying MINITAB to use on a Home Computer

You do not have to purchase any software for this course. The department expects that students will use the software in the labs on campus. However, MINITAB is commercially available. The purpose of this handout is to explain what you can buy or rent, how it compares with what we have in the labs, and to help you see what might work on your own computer. Be sure to check for compatibility with your computer system before you buy any software. Software is not returnable. We cannot help you with your questions about installation, printing, retrieving files, etc. Please do not buy software to use at home unless you are capable of handling those issues on your own.

The software that you buy does not have the data from our text. That data is on the CD inside the back cover of your textbook. If you have lost that CD, you can find those datasets from the publisher's website. I have provided a discussion of this.

Instructions for installing MINITAB at home.

1. No separate versions of MINITAB are currently available for Macs. You can run it on a Mac if you have good PC emulation. Try the free 30-day demo from the MINITAB website to see if this will work for you.
2. Students and faculty members can rent or buy the full version of MINITAB from the education pages. Rental costs are $29.99 for five months, $49.99 for 12 months, and $99.99 to purchase.
3. The Student Edition of MINITAB is published by Addison-Wesley. It costs about $65 and is sometimes available in the textbook section (and possibly the general books section) of the University Coop (476-7211, 2246 Guadalupe, Austin) and other places.
4. Sometimes students try to buy used copies on Amazon.com or other used book places. This is not always satisfactory, because it can be hard to tell whether an item is merely a book of instructions for using MINITAB or the actual software itself.
5. All the students who have taken MATH 1342 via Distance Learning at ACC have used MINITAB at home. Many of them bought a package that included the student version on a CD. If you know a student who did that, perhaps you could borrow it.

What we use in the school labs:

MINITAB, version 14, is available in the Media Center Computer Labs, the Learning Labs, and the math department classrooms with computers where we teach statistics. This requires network access to open it. If the network is down, many of these also have access to MINITAB, Version 12, Student Edition, which can run without the network..

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Last updated on May 26, 2006 . Comments, questions, suggestions?