Title Blackwell Oxford, Teaching TEST 0141-982X S 1 27 OFTWARE Teaching UK Statistics Publishing, Statistics REVIEW Trust Ltd.

2004

SOFTWARE REVIEW
Minitab 14
Minitab 14 is reviewed by Chris du Feu.

easing the use for students. A great deal of thought must have gone into producing these icons. In most cases they do give a good visual idea of what the menu option is. Some, like the pie chart option, are pretty obvious, others less so, but effective when you have understood them (e.g. the staircase for stepwise regression), but a few have defeated MINITABs imagination (we have just 2t as the icon for a 2-sample t test). Never mind the icons will show students (at all levels) what is available and help give them some idea of what the statistical functions do. (Of course, it is possible to customize your icons should you have the time and inspiration!) The graph-drawing facilities have been enhanced. MINITAB now allows you to do almost anything you want to do to a graph within the package there is no need to export to a graphics package for further editing. The graph editing tools are easy to operate and students familiar with a typical drawing package will have no difculty in using them effectively. Graphs may be exported as stand-alone objects in a variety of formats. Only one format (MGF MINITAB Graph Format) is an object-oriented type. This is a pity the others are essentially bit-mapped images which have lost the structural integrity of the vector image and consume vastly more memory and disk space (40 times as much space on one le I tried). However, any graphs pasted from MINITAB into packages which support OLE can be edited as they could be in MINITAB. Because MGF is specic to MINITAB, it cannot be loaded into other packages. There are some vector graphic formats for the PC (e.g. WMF, CGM) it is a pity that graphs could not be exported in these formats too. On the positive side, MGF les can be reloaded into MINITAB and reedited, whereas the bit-mapped images cannot. One feature of statistical packages in general, which students (and teachers) can nd off-putting at rst, is that data are held as single values rather than in frequency tables. After years of training students to gather data efciently in tabular form, it seems odd to encourage them now to enter data item by item. MINITAB 14 allows graph drawing from frequency table data. This means that data already held in frequency tables can be imported into MINITAB, or single-item data in MINITAB can be summarized as a frequency data table within MINITAB. From these tables, graphs can be drawn directly. One feature of many graph-drawing packages (including Excel) is that pie charts can be produced, by default, as misleading and statistically unacceptable three-dimensional monstrosities. I tried

MINITAB 14 is now available. Whenever a new version of a package is issued, two questions arise: Does it work well? Is it compatible with earlier versions? The answer to both of these is an unqualied Yes. Users of earlier Windows-based versions will have no difculty in using version 14. Everything feels familiar; les produced under version 13 load naturally and worksheets from earlier versions can be opened as the appropriate le type. I have not yet managed to crash my version (I am usually pretty good at making things break and did succeed rapidly with the beta test version, but this release has, so far, beaten me). Advanced users who had produced their own macros for version 13 will nd that either they are no longer needed because of the additional features now available, or they can be converted easily for this version. What is different? There are enhancements to the statistical features, user interface and data input and output facilities. The box at the end of this review, which is taken from the MINITAB help section, lists all these developments. As this review is printed in Teaching Statistics, it is appropriate to consider whether version 14 is a better teaching tool than its predecessor. I had found version 13 to be effective in a secondary school and have used it with students as young as 13. It goes without saying that most of the power of MINITAB will not be used by these early learners (but I wonder if any user uses all of its power?). Students seem to be good at ignoring the menu options they do not need and learning to use the ones they do. Version 14 is an improvement on version 13 in a number of ways. Menu options now come with their own icons. Being an old fogey, I think I prefer just words, but young people seem to be much more at home with icons on the computer screen. The icons that are provided can only be an aid to learning, as well as
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Teaching Statistics. Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2005

to force MINITAB to give me one of these evil graphs, but failed. Well done, MINITAB! Other improved facilities which will be useful in schools include the export of project reports and worksheets as HTML pages. Data import now brings Excel les with multiple sheets into separate MINITAB worksheets. On previous versions I found importing CSV les awkward and always resorted to loading them into a spreadsheet before copying to MINITAB via the clipboard. Version 14 allows CSV data to be imported directly although, irritatingly, the CSV le must be renamed with the .TXT extension in order for MINITAB to recognize it. The MINITAB help features are comprehensive and clear. I think, for the rst time, that I prefer the on-line help of MINITAB to a conventional, hernia-inducing, printed manual. There is a small

manual provided with the CD-ROM and this is a masterpiece. It does have a concise reference section at the end which is helpful but the real strength of the manual lies in the way it teaches you both about MINITAB and about statistics. It takes the reader through one of the sample data sets, performing increasingly complex statistical operations on it. At every stage, however, it tells the user not only what to do but also what the purpose of the operation is. I used to tell my students that statistics was a two-stage process Drawing Pictures and Drawing Conclusions. This manual works in that way. You can throw out your old lesson plans now. No need to write new ones just follow this MINITAB manual. In summary then, in spite of the enhanced power of MINITAB, it also has increased value as a teaching tool, even at the simplest statistical levels. Buy it today. CHRIS DU FEU

New and enhanced features in MINITAB 14 (reproduced from their Whats New help le) Graphics New ways to create, customize, and arrange graphs. New graphs and advanced editing capabilities that are simple, powerful, and intuitive. Control Charts New control charts including multivariate EWMA and Hotellings T2 control chart. Quality Tools Cause and effect diagram improvement, capability analysis for normal and nonnormal multiple variables, measurement systems analysis tools, Capability Sixpack, and more. Reliability/Survival Analysis A broad range of reliability test plans and repairable systems analyses to make the most of your research and system improvements. Design of Experiments Additions include variability analysis, pre-processing of responses, prediction of response for predictor variables, and improvements to all aspects of design creation. Regression Release 14 adds partial least squares to its regression battery. Developed for use with ill-conditioned data, the procedure contains 15 built-in graphs. Stat New tests of independence and measures of association, as well as improvements to many Basic Statistics items. Data Window A more exible data window allows currency data, can be saved as HTML, and more.
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Data and File I/O Minitab now allows you to save in HTML format and offers expanded exibility in data types, data generation, and spreadsheet importing. Customizing Defaults Tailor Minitabs menus, toolbars, and preferences to best meet your needs and simplify the tasks you perform most often. Documentation Minitabs new HTML Help simplies navigation and makes printing more convenient. Expanded StatGuide covers multivariate, time series, nonparametrics, and more. Data Sets New data sets provide appropriate data for tutorials and exploring Help examples. Updates to Command Language Minitab now allows access to more functionality through additional command language, and many cumbersome commands have been streamlined.

NEWS & NOTES

Our photograph is of Professor John E Freund and comes with the sad news of his death, peacefully at his home, on 14 August 2004. Many readers of our journal will know Professor Freund through his work in statistical education and in particular through the numerous textbooks that he published. Many of these have reached the status of world-wide standard works, deservedly best-selling. Professor Freund was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He taught for many years at Arizona

State University, after earlier stages of his career spent elsewhere. He will be very much missed. The photograph and general biographical information have kindly been supplied by his son Douglas, to whom we extend condolences. My other news item this month concerns conferences. UK readers will probably know already of BCME, being held this Easter. Also in the UK, at Bristol on 2629 July 2005, is the 7th International Conference on Technology in Mathematics Teaching; details are at http://www.ictmt7.org/. And much is already being done to organise the next ICOTS, in Brazil in 2006. Gerald Goodall Editor

LOOK AHEAD
Forthcoming articles include Using Microsoft Office to generate individualised tasks We can still learn about probability by rolling dice and tossing coins Bluebells and bias, stichwort and statistics
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Teaching Statistics. Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2005