Is Microsoft Excel 2003 ready for the statistics classroom?

The primary question addressed by this article is whether or not Excel 2003 statistical capabilities have been upgraded to a level of functionality that allows its use as the primary statistical software package in statistics courses for business majors. Testing of Excel XP and earlier versions have found that results had flaws with multiple regression that included high collinearity, standard deviations that are based on large samples with little variation, normal distributions, and random number generation. This research utilized Statistical Reference Datasets from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to compare results generated from Microsoft Excel 2003, Microsoft Excel XP, Minitab Release 14, and SPSS 11.5. Results show that many of the past problems with Excel have been corrected and that Excel generates results comparable to Minitab Release 14 and SPSS 11.5.