This self-teaching volume belongs to a long series of similar volumes by Thomas Quirk (the main author) about the basic uses of Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software for simple statistics. This second edition covers the 2019 version of Excel, while the prior edition dealt with the 2016 version. The main features of these volumes are their simple explanations and examples of various statistics functions provided by the spreadsheet tool, supplemented by screen shots guiding readers to their own realizations of the calculations. Explanations are also provided to help format the layouts and print the numerical results. No attention is paid to graphing or plotting the data or results.

Successive chapters deal with elementary notions in statistics and the corresponding Excel calculations: sample size, mean, standard deviation, standard error, random number generation, confidence interval around the mean, hypothesis testing, one-group t-test for the mean and two-group t-test for the difference of the means, correlation, simple linear regression, multiple regression and correlation, and one-way analysis of the variance. Exercises are provided at the end of each chapter, and the volume ends with solutions, some numerical tables, and an index.

A stated in its title, the volume aims at solving “practical problems” as encountered in a wide diversity of domains by professionals or undergraduate students, for whom it is recommended. In a future update or extension, it would be wise to supplement numerical outputs with how-to-plot or graph explanations, as media and business increasingly so require. Also, emphasis should be put on multidimensional data analysis for categorical data, such as discriminant analysis, as nowadays much information is labeled and not only numerical.