if you can use excel to do what you need doing and, it does not lead to any
serious (tweaking?) complications .... fine
but, what happens if you want one of your colleagues to do something a
little different ... like make a x,y plot ... where you have both male and
female data points separately indicated ... ?
the graphics are highly limited ... that's the main problem
my suggestion is the following:
1. invest in a decent stat package for 1 or 2 colleagues ... who would be
willing to make charts and graphs for others now and then ... after all, in
minitab for example ... you can save these as jpg files and post to some
web location ...
2. you can get all to have access to something like minitab ... by each
downloading the 30 day demo ... and if you stagger the time of download ...
have someone have a full version spread across the group ... for a fairly
long time ... so each understand the basics of the package
3. another possibility would be to have one dedicated machine ... with
minitab (for example) on it ... then think about using timbuktu or even
netmeeting ... to take over control of the machine from time to time to run
some stuff
4. ... finally, if everyone has excel .... if they can make the excel file
... then the 1/2 people with the full package CAN easily import that xls
file and do stuff
i guess my view is that there is some better compromise way to handle this
... some middle position that may not get the full package for all (if that
is too much money) but ... to still have some have the full package ... and
others have access to it from time to time ...
At 07:49 PM 1/29/01 +0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Jon,
> > The absolute best advice concerning the use of Excel for
> > graphics (or for statistics for that matter) is: DON'T!
> >
> > The _majority_ of graph-types available in Excel should never
> > be used for any purpose as they produce misleading graphs -- mainly
> > false third dimensions that can only serve to hide important features
> > in the graph.)
>
>But Excel CAN produce simple scatter plots or bar charts. It is just that
>the defaults are so horrible. With a lot of tweaking you can make them
>acceptable. Having said that I do remember an article on the Origin web
>site which suggested even simple charts in Excel were wrong.
>
>My problem is cost. I want to get everyone in my department to have the
>facility to produce reasonable charts that have a common style. I do all
>of mine in Statistica (a single copy) but I cannot afford 15 copies
>simply to produce the occasional scatter plot, or box plot. Nor does
>anyone have the time to produce everyone elses charts for them.
>
>Three Excel addins have come my way, during this search. XLstat,
>Analyse-IT and Winstat. All produce boxplots, and Winstat seems the most
>generally useful, but for some reason the Winstat chart defaults are
>useless for scientific/technical use.
>
>None are entirely satisfactory, and I am still looking for the best
>solution.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Graham S
>.
>
>
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_________________________________________________________
dennis roberts, educational psychology, penn state university
208 cedar, AC 8148632401, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://roberts.ed.psu.edu/users/droberts/drober~1.htm
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