Jerzy Letkowski

(Western New England University, USA)

 

 

Abstract: VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro had their days followed by long and almost absolute dominance of Microsoft Excel. In terms of the spreadsheet functionality, Excel has reached a state close to perfection as a problem solving software tool. Its operation is fast, smooth and efficient. It is equipped with a reach set of build in functions and services. It can virtually be infinitely extended by means of its macros (VBA). Today, which is around year 2016, an explosion of new spreadsheet alternatives is happening with interesting new solutions provided for different systems, ranging from Windows, through OS X, iOS, Linux, to Android and others. This paper attempts to explore capabilities of the most popular alternatives: Google Sheets and Open Office Calc with respect to solving statistical problems. Although its focus is on spreadsheet solutions for doing both the descriptive and inferential Statistics, using built-in functions, examples of user-defined functions are also given.

 

 

Key words: statistics; spreadsheet; built-in function; user-defined function

 

JEL codes: C46, C83, C88