We consider several factors in choosing statistical software for this course. We want students to learn to use a professional statistical software package and not have to spend too much time, attention, or money on that. There are many other programs besides professional statistical packages that will do some statistical calculations. Each has some drawbacks, including that some of them, like Excel, actually do some incorrect calculations. However, most of them are very convenient for the times that you do not have a professional-level statistics software package available.

A variety of professional-level statistics programs are available. MINITAB, SPSS, SAS, JMP, S, and R and many others are powerful programs that have capabilities far beyond those you will learn in this course. That means that if, in the future, you need to learn something a bit more advanced that what we did, these programs would support that. Of course, some are more powerful than others and some are easier to use than others.

There are a variety of free statistical software programs available. In general, these do not have as much help and documentation available or as many statistical procedures as the more standard statistical software. And with any software, you must trust that the author has used correct procedures in programming the procedures.

Sometimes people use a spreadsheet (such as Excel) or programmable calculator (often the TI-83) to do statistical computations. In our experience, instructors who use these rather than a statistics software package make some tradeoffs that we find unacceptable.

Our committee has looked at these options and chosen MINITAB. So you are required to learn MINITAB and to use it on an appropriate number of problems in our course.

The publisher of our text makes Crunch-It available to students. That is a web-based statistics package for elementary statistics that used to be free and now is very low cost (or maybe free for you.) If you don't have MINITAB available at home, you may find this very useful for many of the problems. Be sure, though, to go to the lab at school to use MINITAB as required on the problems listed in the homework as needing MINITAB. There is no manual for it and we won't be writing one because it is a web-based package that changes from time to time. However, it works similarly enough to MINITAB that, if you are learning to use MINITAB, as required, it should be pretty easy to use Crunch-It.

We continually evaluate the various options and additional information will be posted here from time to time. If you have questions or comments about ACC's choice of software at this time, please contact Mary Parker, who is the chair of the course committee for MATH 1342. mparker@austincc.edu

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Last updated January 14, 2007 . Comments, questions, suggestions?