This introductory textbook for business statistics teaches statistical
analysis and research methods via business case studies and financial
data using Excel, Minitab, and SAS. Every chapter in this textbook
engages the reader with data of individual stock, stock indices,
options, and futures.
One studies and uses statistics to learn how to study, analyze, and
understand a data set of particular interest. Some of the more popular
statistical programs that have been developed to use statistical and
computational methods to analyze data sets are SAS, SPSS, and Minitab.
Of those, we look at Minitab and SAS in this textbook. One of the main
reasons to use Minitab is that it is the easiest to use among the
popular statistical programs. We look at SAS because it is the leading
statistical package used in industry. We also utilize the much less
costly and ubiquitous Microsoft Excel to do statistical analysis, as the
benefits of Excel have become widely recognized in the academic world
and its analytical capabilities extend to about 90 percent of
statistical analysis done in the business world. We demonstrate much of
our statistical analysis using Excel and double check the analysis and
outcomes using Minitab and SAS-also helpful in some analytical methods
not possible or practical to do in Excel.