In this second edition of An Introduction to Statistics using Microsoft Excel the authors have introduced the concept of thinking statistically, which offers a further set of insights relating to how the wider application of ideas concerning variation, which underpins statistics, may be used more generally. Thinking statistically is not a question of mastering a statistical technique, but rather of acquiring a mindset which does not accept the obvious and seeks to understand what is actually going on in real life situations.

An Introduction ot Statistics using Microsfot Excel dicusses the use of statistics in a research context. We chose this approach because we believe that research examples clearly demonstrate the wide statistical facilities and functions within Excel. This is an unusual statistics book in that it contains very few formulae. So don't look for the formula for the standard deviation or the median for the normal distribution. These are not in this book. There are only a handful of the basic formulae required to effectively use statistics and all readers will be able to handle these.

This book explains the statistical concepts and the uses Microsoft Excel functions to illustrate how to get results using the appropriate techniques which will help researchers directly with their analyses. Thus this book looks at statistics as tools. Tools researchers can use to help understand their research findings and guide them towards drawing valid assumptions. To facilitate learning the book uses lots of examples and because statistics is one of those subjects which is really only ever understood after a considerable amount of practice, data files have been made available online for readers' use.