I cannot imagine any other reason to go to such an inane plan. You haven’t got down the idea of total cost or customer focus. You have customers called BB’s, GB’s, and MBB’s who are going to do a training program and project and then instead of having the basic ease of point and click on a proven piece of software, they get the added pleasure of double clutching a make shift program for what? So somebody can save a couple bucks on software? If that is the motivation – stop doing SS right now. The answer is yes Excel can do a lot of the stuff required for SS. It makes absolutely no sense at all and the people who try it seem to be lacking the basic gene that would allow you to deploy any of this stuff (Lean, TQM, SS, etc.) effectively.

I have seen a lot of people try to do the Excel thing. In one of the more recent threads there was some input from “Steve” – assuming San Marcos, Steve – sounded like him – that might help you with comparisons to other packages. Minitab has lot many additional features such as sample size calculations, control charts and normality tests, which are not there in excel.Įxcel analyses are not very very accurate for borderline cases (Algorithms behind these are not as robust as behind those of Minitab).Īs someone else stated earlier this subject has been beat to death in earlier threads. However excel can compute Chi sq value by specifying expression =Chitest(observed_range,expcted_range). Comprehension of analyses is easy for company leadership.Ĭhi sq test option is not there in Analysis ToolPak. Minitab output is full of graphs (we get six graphs for capability studies).

These analyses if carried out with excel, need some additional effort than a mere click on the mouse. Other statistical analyses – Chi sq, gage R&R, Cp etc can also be done using excel as a spreadsheet (feeding formulae). One ss tool not possible at all with Excel is DOE, but any informed person can do experiment designing using a few tables.Īll excel tools are extremely user friendly (key feature of all Microsoft products) and analytical output generated as another excel worksheet contains only relevant information (no six packs…)Īpplication of these tools could cater to the implied need of those lesser mortals like me (belts or no belts) that are willing to explore the benefits of six-sigma, but proficiency in Minitab as a prerequisite acting as stumbling block.Īlthough Minitab has following (and many more) advantages over Excel:Įxcel does not have all the tools like gauge R&R, Capability analysis etc. These tools are Regression, anova, anova two way with replications, descriptive statistics, T test for means, F test for two variances etc. Microsoft Excel offers some good statistical analysis tools, (though they need one time activation).

Microsoft xlminer analysis toolpak