The Comment

Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 10:17:45 -0400
From: Danielle Donkersloot <Danielle.Donkersloot@dep.state.nj.us>


For those were aren't already aware, Excel has some "problems" with its statistical functions. The attached website that provides a freeware source for a spreadsheet with correct equations named Gnumeric. Our thanks to the retired Dave Steadfast at USGS for this info. Hopefully you will find this useful.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/

Responses

Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 08:36:01 -0700
From: David Kirschtel <kirschte@msu.edu>

Another potential FOSS spreadsheet is the one included in OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org). This is an integrated software set developed as an opensource off-shoot of Suns StarOffice. OO runs on all major platforms (osx, linux, solaris and windoze)

If you are planning on doing anything more than very simple descriptive stats, you may want to consider looking in to R (http:// www.r-project.org). However, it's effectively a programming environment and the learning curve can be rather arduous. R runs on osx, unix and windoze

Excel is notorious for problems with its stats functions - from what I can recall from discussions on other list the problems tend to centered around things like missing data, unbalanced designs (and I'm
sure there a more). What makes it even worse is that Microsoft won't allow the stats researchers to look at the algorithms. So not only are there problems, but you're never sure when and were the problems
will crop up.

David

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David Kirschtel, Ph.D
Sr Program Manager
CUAHSI
2000 Florida Ave, NW
Washington, DC

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