Most statistical writing is vague and abstract; these videos make the concepts concrete using Excel charts, tools, and functions. Statistical analysis takes two main forms: descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics provide numbers that describe how values cluster together (averages), disperse (standard deviations), and vary together (correlations). Inferential statistics informs us regarding the probability that the descriptive statistics that we calculate from samples are accurate estimators of the populations from which we took the samples. These techniques are well worked out in theory and in applications such as Microsoft Excel. They have applicability in fields as diverse as politics and sports, as economics and agriculture, as psychology and business management, as achievement testing and manufacturing.

This tutorial on statistical analysis is designed to provide conceptual overviews of topics such as testing the reliability of the difference between the means of a treatment group and a control group, followed by demonstrations of how to handle the topic in Excel. Topics such as statistical power are crucial to understanding inferential analysis but history shows that they are very difficult to communicate through text. By using auditory explanations in combination with Excel's powerful charting capabilities, it’s possible to communicate these abstract notions in a concrete fashion. Students and other consumers of this sort of information find it much easier to follow, and much faster to assimilate.

About the Author:

Conrad Carlberg has a doctorate in statistics from the University of Colorado, Boulder and studied under one of the foremost statisticians of the last century, Gene Glass. he is a multi-time recipient of Microsoft's MVP/Excel award, and has written somewhere around 15 books on Excel, including one originally published in 1995 and now in its 4th edition. Conrad's book Predictive Analytics: Microsoft Excel 2010 was published in July 2012.