Introductory Business Statistics with Interactive Spreadsheets – 1st Canadian Edition

From the Adapting Author – Introduction to the 1st Canadian Edition

In the era of digital devices, interactive learning has become a vital part of the process of knowledge acquisition. The learning process for the gadget generation students, who grow up with a wide range of digital devices, has been dramatically affected by the interactive features of available computer programs. These features can improve students’ mastery of the content by actively engaging them in the learning process. Despite the fact that many commercialized software packages exist, Microsoft Excel is yet known as one of the fundamental tools in both teaching and learning statistical and quantitative techniques.

With these in mind, two new features have been added to this textbook. First, all examples in the textbook have been Canadianized. Second, unlike the majority of conventional economics and business statistics textbooks available in the market, this textbook gives you a unique opportunity to learn the basic and most common applied statistical techniques in business in an interactive way when using the web version. For each topic, a customized interactive template has been created. Within each template, you will be given an opportunity to repeatedly change some selected inputs from the examples to observe how the entire process as well as the outcomes are automatically adjusted. As a result of this new interactive feature, the online textbook will enable you to learn actively by re-estimating and/or recalculating each example as many times as you want with different data sets. Consequently, you will observe how the associated business decisions will be affected. In addition, most commonly used statistical tables that come with conventional textbooks along with their distributional graphs have been coded within these interactive templates. For instance, the interactive template for the standard normal distribution provides the value of the z associated with any selected probability of z along with the distribution graph that shows the probability in a shaded area. The interactive Excel templates enable you to reproduce these values and depict the associated graphs as many times as you want, a feature that is not offered by conventional textbooks. Editable files of these spreadsheets are available in the appendix of the web version of this textbook (http://opentextbc.ca/introductorybusinessstatistics/) for instructors and others who wish to modify them.

It is highly recommended that you use this new feature as you read each topic by changing the selected inputs in the yellow cells within the templates. Other than cells highlighted in yellow, the rest of the worksheets have been locked. In the majority of cases the return/enter key on your keyboard will execute the operation within each template. The F9 key on your keyboard can also be used to update the content of the template in some chapters. Please refer to the instructions within each chapter for further details on how to use these templates.

From the Original Author

There are two common definitions of statistics. The first is “turning data into information”, the second is “making inferences about populations from samples”. These two definitions are quite different, but between them they capture most of what you will learn in most introductory statistics courses. The first, “turning data into information,” is a good definition of descriptive statistics—the topic of the first part of this, and most, introductory texts. The second, “making inferences about populations from samples”, is a good definition of inferential statistics—the topic of the latter part of this, and most, introductory texts.