R Through Excel: A Spreadsheet Interface for Statistics, Data Analysis, and Graphics

Abstract

MS Excel, the most widely available spreadsheet on MS Windows ma- chines, is often used for data collection, manipulation, and storage. Elementary and medium-complexity mathematical and statistical functions are included with Excel. More advanced and highly reliable statistical analysis in Excel requires an add-in package. R is one of the best statistics programs available. It is an extensible sys- tem of software facilities for data manipulation, statistical analysis, and graphical display. With RExcel, the entire R environment (including more than a thousand contributed packages) can be treated as an extension of Excel. This book is a supplementary text to any introductory course in statistics. The book supports the instructor by giving students step-by-step screenshots showing access to state-of-the-art statistical computations in R directly from the menu bar in Excel. The book can also be used as a computational introduction by data analysts who already have basic statistical skills.