Welcome to the Wellesley College Chemistry Department's Statistical Analysis of Data Home Page. You will use this page to study a number of aspects of the statistical analysis of data, and you will then make use of what you have learned here in the laboratory portion of your Introductory Chemistry (and other) course(s).

Many of the lessons here involve using Excel. In a few cases you are asked to open Excel and then do some calculations. This means that Excel must be on the computer you are using. In most of the lessons, clicking on the appropriate link opens a particular Excel spreadsheet. In order for this to work, Excel must be on the computer you are using, and your browser must be set to read Excel files. If you have any questions about this consult the appropriate computer consultants in the public clusters or your Dorm-Net consultant for your personal machine. Whenever you have finished with a spreadsheet please exit it so that you do not end up having multiple copies of Excel running on the same machine. If you are not familiar with Excel, pressing the button will take to you a short tutorial. 


If you are using this tutorial as part of a laboratory course, and if your laboratory instructor has requested that you send your answers by electronic mail, you will need to use the form below. If you are using the tutorial for your own purposes you may proceed directly to the various lessons by clicking on the lesson name below. (Every time you leave this page and return, the email destination is reset to the first name on the list. If you are using the email form please check that the appropriate recipient is selected before sending your mail.)

A special note to user of keyservered Excel (on most Macs at Wellesley): When you click to open your first Excel sheet, the keyserver message will appear before you can open Excel. After finishing with an Excel sheet, you have two options. You can quit Excel. This returns the copy of Excel you were using to the keyserver pool. The next time you try to interact with a sheet, you will have to go through the wholeprocess of starting Excel and the keyserver again. If you choose not to do this, and to merely close the first sheet in Excel, the next sheet you try to open will be saved on your desktop, and you will asked which file you wish to open in Excel. To facilitate that process, the name of each Excel spreadsheet appears on the status bar when you move the mouse over the button.

Click on the Lesson You Wish To Go To:

Graphical Presentation of Data

Precision and Accuracy

Mean and Standard Deviation

The Normal Distribution

Confidence Intervals and Criteria for the Rejection of Data

Regression and Curve Fitting

Elements of Probability


 

 

 

 

 

go to a review of significant figures

return to Chemistry Department Home Page

 

  • Flick Coleman wcoleman@wellesley.edu
  • Dept. of Chemistry
  • Date Created: Aug 5, 1997
  • Last Modified: January 10, 2005
  • Expires: Aug 1, 2014
  • copyright by W.F. Coleman - 1997