STAT177 pre-course material

Welcome to STAT177. I look forward to introducing you to the basics of statistical analysis as used in business.

This is a computer intensive class - almost everything we do will be done on Microsoft Excel.

To download your copy of Gerry's Handbook of Statistical Analysis for Non-math Types to your home computer, click this link: Gerry's Handbook. You need to have chosen a password in order to download the book.

To download Gerry's Stats Tools to your home computer, click this link: Gerry's Stats Tools.

You will need a zip utility to unzip the files. If you don't have one, you can get a 30-day trial version of PKZip at www.pkware.com

Be sure to install Gerry's Stats Tools on your home computer. The thing to keep in mind is that Gerry's Stats Tools is an Excel add-in file. (Its official file name is Gerry's Stats Tools.xla.) You open this file just like you would any other Excel file. It contains a whole bunch of Excel macros that are designed to make stats analysis easier for you. (For those of you who don't know, a macro is a computer program. For the technically minded among you, the macros in Gerry's Stats Tools are programmed in Visual Basic for Applications or VBA for short.)

In order to use Gerry's Stats Tools and Excel Data Analysis tools, there are a few things in Excel you have to check:

  1. Under the Tools menu, go to Macros and then Security. Under the Security Level tab, make sure the security is set at medium.
  2. Under the Tools menu, go to Add-Ins. Make sure that both the Analysis ToolPak and Analysis Toolpak - VBA boxes are checked.
When you open Gerry's Stats Tools, you should get a dialogue box telling you that Gerry's Stats Tools contains macros (if the macro security is set on medium). Click the middle button to enable the macros. After you do that, Gerry's Stats Tools will appear in the menu bar to the immediate left of Windows. Click it and the menu should pull down. The first item in the list is "What test do I choose?".

If you can't access the macros (for whatever reason) email or phone me and I'll help you through it. It's normally a straight-forward process. The last thing I want is for you to go through the entire term not being able to practise using the macros at home.

There are 3 types of skills you need for this course: math, logic and Excel. The first class of the course draws on basic arithmetic skills and some basic logic skills. After that, the computer does the math for you and the focus shifts to logic skills. Throughout the course, you will need Excel skills. There will be material and skills that you will need to remember from class to class.

Here is a short test on these 3 skills. If you don't do well on this test, it doesn't mean you can't do well in the course - it means you might have to work harder to do well.

Math and Logic

  1. Given the equation 21x = 621, what does x equal? Round your answer to one decimal.
  2. Sam sells hot dogs on a street corner. His fixed costs per day are $26. His gross profit per hot dog is 75 cents. How many hot dogs per day does he have to sell to achieve a profit of $50 per day?
  3. Suppose the selling price of a home depends on the square footage. Suppose further the selling price can be estimated by the equation: price = 100,000 + 100 x square footage. If a house has 1500 square feet, what would we estimate the price to be?
  4. You have a group of 4 boys and 8 girls; 3 of the boys know how to play chess and 3 of the girls know how to play chess. What percentage of the total group who knows how to play chess are girls?
  5. You have a box with red, white and blue balls; 25% of the balls are red and 34% are white. What percentage of the balls are blue?
  6. If the percentage of adults who eat out at least twice a week is 65%, what percentage of adults eat out at most once a week?

    Excel

  7. Suppose you have 500 numbers in column A running from cell A1 through cell A500. How would you find the average of these numbers?
  8. Suppose you have 500 numbers in column A. How would you sort them from lowest to highest?
  9. A cell contains the formula =1000/34. How would you round this value to 1 decimal?
  10. Suppose you have some numbers in column A. You want to multiply them by 2 and put the results in column B. How would you do that?
  11. You have a decimal number in cell A10. How would you change it to read as a percentage?
  12. Suppose you have a sheet complete with data, formulas, borders and colour formatting from column A through column E and you want to delete everything, including the formatting. How would you do that?
  13. Suppose you can't read everything in column C. How would you change the width of the column so that you can read everything?

To see how you did, go to the answer page.

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