Excel Templates: A Helpful Tool for Teaching Statistics

ABSTRACT

This article describes a free, open-source collection of templates for the popular Excel (2013, and later versions) spreadsheet program. These templates are spreadsheet files that allow easy and intuitive learning and the implementation of practical examples concerning descriptive statistics, random variables, confidence intervals, and hypothesis testing. Although they are designed to be used with Excel, they can also be employed with other free spreadsheet programs (changing some particular formulas). Moreover, we exploit some possibilities of the ActiveX controls of the Excel Developer Menu to perform interactive Gaussian density charts. Finally, it is important to note that they can be often embedded in a web page, so it is not necessary to employ Excel software for their use. These templates have been designed as a useful tool to teach basic statistics and to carry out data analysis even when the students are not familiar with Excel. Additionally, they can be used as a complement to other analytical software packages. They aim to assist students in learning statistics, within an intuitive working environment. Supplementary materials with the Excel templates are available online.

KEYWORDS:

• Interactive charts
• Spreadsheet
• Teaching and learning

Supplementary Material

• Excel-templates: The set of templates described in this article, classified in four folders, according to the four groups of procedures described in Section 3. (.zip file)

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the Editor and the Associate Editor for many useful suggestions.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Grant MTM2014-52876-R for the second author.