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dataanalysisexcelmacMicrosoft’s spreadsheet application known as Excel, found in Microsoft Office, features graphing tools, calculation capabilities, pivot tables and many other helpful tools for its users. In addition to these default features, the user may choose to incorporate various add-ins offered by Microsoft at no cost. The add-in we are discussing today is the Analysis ToolPak which performs complex statistical and engineering analyses.

This particular Excel add-in is easy to install and use and saves the user time in performing complex analyses. Because these functions are quite complex and not needed by the average Excel user, they are not found in the default version of the program and it is necessary for the user to add them on his or herself.

Excel’s Data Analysis ToolPak for Mac is easy to install:

  1. Click the “Tools” tab at the top of the screen while in Excel.
  2. Then click “Add-Ins”
  3. Finally, check the box that says “Analysis ToolPak” then “OK”

The program will then take a few seconds to add this feature to Excel. After it is done loading, the user can access the Data Analysis ToolPak by clicking the “Tools” tab again at the top of the screen and then clicking “Data Analysis”, which now appears at the bottom of this pull-down menu.

After accessing Data Analysis, a box pops up with the various analysis tools. The next section will describe the various tools that the Data Analysis ToolPak has to offer.

Functions of the Analysis ToolPak

There are 19 different functions found within this feature. We won’t get into every one, as a few of them are subsets of more general functions.

What do These Tools Look Like in Use?

Here’s a few screenshots to show some of these handy tools in action.

anova results in the QI Macros for Excel

Above is an example of how the Anova feature would work.

And this is the correlation function in use.

Formatting cells as percentages

Finally, we have the rank and percentile tool pictured. Here, a teacher has put her students’ grades into the program and their grade (percentile) has been calculated from the data given.

While MS Excel for Mac can be utilized very effectively for relatively simple tasks, it can also perform very specific, complex analysis functions with the Data Analysis ToolPak add-in. Depending on how you need to analyze certain data and variables, Excel can accommodate even the most demanding users such as engineers, statisticians and business owners, among many others.

Page Last Updated: January 2014

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