TITLE:
XLR: A Free Excel Add-In for Introductory Business Statistics
AUTHORS:
Pin T. Ng
KEYWORDS:
Excel Add-ins; Statistical Computing; Teaching Business Statistics; R
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Applied Sciences,
Vol.3 No.1B1,
July
11,
2013
ABSTRACT: XLR is an Excel add-in that unifies the user friendly,
widely popular interface of Excel with the powerful and robust computational
capability of the GNU statistical and graphical language R. The add-in attempts
to address the American Statistical Association’s comment that “Generic
packages such as Excel are not sufficient even for the teaching of statistics,
let alone for research and consulting.” R is the program of choice for
researchers in statistical methodology that is freely available under the Free
Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GPL) Agreement. By wedding
the interactive mode of Excel with the power of statistical computing of R, XLR
provides a solution to the problem of numerical inaccuracy of using Excel and
its various internal statistical functions and procedures by harnessing the computational
power of R. XLR will be distributed under the GNU GPL Agreement. The GPL puts
students, instructors and researchers in control of their usage of the software
by providing them with the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and
improve the software, thus, freeing them from the bondage of proprietary
software. The creation of XLR will not only have a significant impact on the
teaching of an Introductory Business Statistics course by providing a free
alternative to the commercial proprietary software but also provide researchers
in all disciplines who require sophisticated and cutting edge statistical and
graphical procedures with a user-friendly interactive data analysis tool when
the current set of available commands is expanded to include more advance
procedures.