While some familiarity with spreadsheets is expected, the book includes self-contained instructions in spreadsheets integrated with the teaching of statistics. Another distinguishing feature of the book is numerous well-written cases focused on real life applications of statistics. The book can be used in undergraduate as well as MBA classes, and for those of us who feel uncomfortable using full-blown Harvard cases in undergraduate classes, this is an invaluable source. The emphasis of the book is on developing the students' ability to understand and address real problems in a sensible and useful way, and in its exposition the book stays away from using too many formulae or lengthy calculations. This book starts with an introduction to Excel and how to manage and print files in Excel.
Subsequent chapters describe how to use all the statistical features available in Excel.
The last two chapters cover how to construct formulae for statistical measures and methods not readily available in Excel, such as the Durbin-Watson statistic, autocorrelation, and autoregression. Coverage of statistics per se is minimal as the book is intended to be a how-to supplement for a regular statistics text. As there are a number of ways for performing the same analysis in Excel, the book illustrates a variety of them, starting with the simplest. The author suggests that the data sets for the examples are intentionally small and can be quickly entered by the user, or copied via anonymous ftp by the user, or requested from the publisher at a nominal price. In comparison to the previous book, this book can serve either as a supplementary text or as the main text for an introductory statistics course.