Using MS Excel for Quantitative Data Analysis

(By Get Down on Flickr. Creative Commons)

If you've undertaken Quantitative Data techniques (such as questionnaires) in your Research Project or Dissertation, you may well have been left with lots of tally charts, Likert Scales or assorted ticks and crosses on handouts that you need to try and make some sense out of.

For any advanced statisticians out there, the best software to use to analyse numerical data is SPSS which is ridiculously expensive and not easy to use (a free trial version is available, though this expires after 14 days).

Alternatively, there is a Freeware version (cheekily called PSPP, it performs most of the same functions, but at no cost to you), though again if  you are not familiar with t-tests, anova, linear regression and non-parametric tests this isn't for the faint-hearted!

Luckily, there is a lot you can do with Microsoft Excel to generate and display decent data for you to analyse and cross-reference in order to unveil and support the findings of your research. These interactive tutorials help you master some of the advanced techniques for yourself.