Page last updated 2 February  2011.

Neville Hunt and I have produced many interactive Excel sheets to help students learn about Excel and about statistics. DISCUS was first produced years ago as a cheap and cheerful set of spreadsheets for Discovering Important Statistical Concepts Using Spreadsheets.

It consists of about 40 Excel speadsheets, which you are free to modify, and which are freely downloadable from the DISCUS site. There are also Word files with suggested exercises. 

The Web based version is DISCUSS, which is macro free, and provides feedback to the questions. Remember that you can save these spreadsheets to your hard disk and then run them from there in classes - you do not have to use them on the web.

Spreadsheets from past conferences:

Over the years I have produced several spreadsheets to teach the various elements of Excel in as painless and quick a way as possible. For the following files, left click to display, right click to download.

Excel 2003 files:

Drawing a quadratic : This is my favourite - how to draw an interactive quadratic which also teaches you all the basics, plus some clever stuff, in Excel, all in under 20 minutes.

Introduction to Excel : this covers entering text and numbers, formatting columns, naming, functions, charts and various short cuts. On the way you build up a spreadsheet to demonstrate fitting a line to a series of points using the least squares method.

Filters and Pivot Tables ; these are the gems in Excel.

Spinners, sliders, and pictograms this covers text to columns, drawing a spinner, slider (scroll bar), a pictogram, ogive with interactive marker, and a text box.

The Poisson distribution: step by step instructions on drawing a Poisson distribution chart similar to the one in DISCUS.

The Binomial distribution: step by step instructions on drawing a Binomial distribution chart similar to the one in DISCUS.

The Normal distribution: step by step instructions on drawing a Normal distribution chart similar to the one in DISCUS.