The material in this text is not designed for passive reading. Rather, you should be reading the material while you have some sort of software package to help you work through the examples. Most modern spreadsheets (e.g. Microsoft Excel) will easily allow you to follow along. There is a separate supplement for this text including guides for using Excel and a separate Excel plug-in called StatPro to work through the examples and explorations. There is also a summary guide for using the free software R (through a nice interface called R Commander) to work through the text.
The software provides a dynamic environment for problem solving. In particular, readers will have the opportunity to learn about and use the following tools: pivot tables, sorting, stacking and unstacking data, basic statistical functions, frequency tables, sumproduct, building boxplots and histograms, correlation tables, simple regression, multivariable regression (quantitative and qualitative), scatterplots, trendlines, Goal Seek, SOLVER table and graphing in three dimensions. In addition, students will develop many basic computer literacy abilities, such as copying and pasting and integrating numerical, textual and graphical analyses into a single Word document. But what is most important about the way students learn these tools is that they are all taught in the context of solving business-type problems; this context, we believe, is critical for students learning how to transform these tools from a set of instructions to follow into a method of thinking and analyzing data.