Re: counting query

["John D. Burger" <john(at)mitre(dot)org>]

Joris Dobbelsteen wrote:

> Personally I've found nothing that will beat Excel for doing data
> analysis. Learn to use the pivot table and pivot charts. They are
> extremely powerful.

Funny, there is an on-going discussion about this on one of our  
internal mailing lists.  Excel is perhaps okay for simple analysis,  
and drawing pretty pictures, but the statistics routines, necessary  
for any kind of detailed analysis, have historically had lots of  
problems.  Here're a few explications of the many ways Excel seems to  
fall down:

  http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jcryer/JSMTalk2001.pdf
  http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelreg.pdf

- John Burger