Excel 2013 for physical sciences statistics is an interesting and valuable little book. It shows how to use Microsoft Excel functions and add-ins to accomplish basic statistical tasks such as finding the mean, standard deviation, random numbers, confidence interval about the mean, one- and two-group t-tests, correlation and linear regression (both simple and multiple), and a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The book explains what these tasks are used for and how to do them step-by-step using Excel. It also has the reader perform the calculations in Excel as the author demonstrates. The book has lots of illustrations and screen shots to show what the screens should look like as you do the problems and provides additional exercises at the end of each chapter to practice the solution methods. For more complicated statistical methods and definitions, the text gives references where the information can be found.

Because Excel is not a statistical package like SPSS or others, it obviously cannot be expected to perform the same calculations as such packages, but it can perform simple calculations, and Excel or comparable spreadsheet packages are available in most offices. This book would best be described as a handbook for simple statistical calculations, a handy source for reviewing statistical concepts and how to calculate them, and a primer to use before going into a more rigorous statistics course. It would also be valuable to a manager who has not done any statistical work in some time and needs a review before dealing with subordinates who are using statistics to justify their work or recommend decisions. Although the title says it is for physical sciences, it is equally applicable to other areas where statistics are used. (Note: Although the book lists Excel 2013 as the application, I ran most of the exercises on Excel 2016 without any difficulty. See comparable texts [1,2].)