EXCEL-BASED COMPUTER LABS

BUSN 130 - ECON 130 - FIN 130: APPLIED STATISTICS
Department of Economics and Business
Lake Forest College
Copyright, Fall 2013

As a student in Busn/Econ/Fin 130, you are required to complete the following eight labs over the course of the semester. It is important to learn how to use Excel for your upper-level classes and for your eventual career. To that end, you can talk to classmates, RTC workers, and reference librarians when working through the Tutorial section of each lab, but you must do your own work (talking to no one) when working through the Exercises section and writing up your results.

LAB DESIGN

There will be two in-class evaluations of your Excel skills (roughly mid-term and end-of-term). Both evaluations will take place in room 203 of the library. It is important to keep in mind that, while you are technically allowed to do the labs on any computer, you will be tested on the computers in room 203 of the library.

Each lab begins with a Tutorial section that walks through various Excel commands and functions. The tutorials are designed to be extremely user-friendly. The more one remembers from previous labs, the quicker one will be able to move through the tutorial. Any step not completely described in the tutorial section of a lab has been covered in the tutorial section of a previous lab.

Following the tutorial, each lab includes an Exercises section that asks the student to do several tasks in Excel. The exercises are directly linked to the tutorial.

Each of the labs requires you to e-mail one or two Excel files to your professor. Depending on the lab, you might also be requried to turn in a a filled-in answer sheet or to print and turn in a graph you created in Excel. The instructions for each lab make it clear what you need to turn in under the section Turning in Your Work section, which is found toward the end of each lab.

LAB FILES

Lab #1: An Introduction to Excel

PDF Files: Instructions and Answer Sheet
Data Files: Highschools.txt and Orphans.txt

Lab #2: Graphing in Excel

PDF Files: Instructions
Data Files: 2002 International Transparency Data.xlsx

Lab #3: Discrete Random Variables

PDF Files: Instructions and Answer Sheet
Data Files: No data to download

Lab #4: Continuous Random Variables

PDF Files: Instructions
Data Files: No data to download

Lab #5: Law of Large Numbers

PDF Files: Instructions and Answer Sheet
Data Files: Law of Large Numbers Data.xlsx

Lab #6: Testing Means and Differences in Means

PDF Files: Instructions and Answer Sheet
Data Files: 2007 MLB Attendance Data.xlsx and Male-Female Wages and SAT Scores.xlsx

Lab #7: Simple Linear Regression

PDF Files: Instructions and Answer Sheet
Data Files: No data to download

Lab #8: Multiple Regression in Excel

PDF Files: Instructions and Answer Sheet
Data Files: House Values.xlsx and Pennsylvania Schools.xlsx