SPSS is a very sophisticated statistical software package for data analysis. However, SPSS is not the only tool. Microsoft Excel has a built-in plug-in called "Analysis Toolpak" that provides a number of useful statistical functions, such as,

• Histogram
• Descriptive Statistics
• Anova
• F-Test
• t-Test
• Moving Average
• Exponential Smoothing
• Correlation
• Regression

To use them users have to ENABLE the "Analysis Toolpak" plug-in in Excel. For details, please kindly refer to http://www.excel-easy.com/data-analysis/analysis-toolpak.html.

Please note that students are entitled to have 5 copies of the entire MS Office ProPlus suite for free. Please refer to Microsoft Student Advantage for details.

There are also other free statistical software packages you may find useful, some of which can be found on http://statpages.org/javasta2.html.