Data Analysis for Managers With Microsoft Excel With Infotrac

Rating:
Summary: Challenging Textbook, full of practical Excel techniques
Review: Best for an MBA textbook or very dedicated self-study for quantitatively oriented business analysts. You learn a lot of Excel skills and how to produce practical tables, charts and other exhibits in Excel.

Using traditional statistical software such as SAS, SPSS, Statistica, etc. makes the teaching and learning simpler. Using specialized software is the way to go if you are going to learn heavy-duty statistics (PhD research or Stats major). However, if you are an MBA student, you probably will not have access to specialized statistical software, since the jobs for which that is cost-justified generally are staffed by stats majors. Thus, learning to do a great analysis job using Excel is beneficial in the job-market "afterlife".

This book isn't an "easy read," as you will need to work carefully *all* the examples to really understand what is going on, especially with the early chapters. A common problem is skimming over the examples, then running into a wall in later chapters. If you really study the heck out of each example, things seem to go well. The book comes with the data files for all the examples. The instructor's edition comes with excellent solutions for all the problems. The author really knows how to make Excel do anything!

I earned an MBA many years ago from a top ten MBA program and worked in business after that, including owning my own business. Later I returned to school for a phd degree and now teach stats in a b-school.

Rating:
Summary: Waste of Money
Review: I am using this book for a MBA class at a Top 20 school. Our class is focused on students who have not had any formal background in statistics. This book lacks in depth explanations for its problems. Its solutions manual is marginally helpful because it also does not explain how it reaches the answers.

Granted this book is mean to be used with excel, but it relies too much on Excel to do the computation. Thus the student is limited in building a strong basis in statistics.

Unfortunately, my whole MBA class is going through is agony with this book.