R for Microsoft® Excel Users: Making the Transition for Statistical Analysis by Conrad Carlberg
Okay, so why did I read this book… I was tempted to not add this book to my review of ‘books’ I read in 2017 as I’m not including fiction books that I’ve read or books that I read to my kids. So does this book really relate to my work or professional life? Well, sort of. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve completed a maths degree and so I have an interest in maths. I’ve also read a book on Statistics which was partially related to process improvement programme at work. Now R is something I’ve downloaded and installed on a number of machines over the years, but never really did anything with it. So a book on R for Excel users… Whilst I am an Excel user I’m not a user of Excel’s statistically analysis tools. So reading this book taught me more about Excel then R!!!
As you may have noticed, I haven’t so much read these books as ‘listened’ to these books, and as I mentioned the other day, listening to a book on maths is somewhat challenging. This book wasn’t as bad as the stats book I tried to have my phone read to me, but it did create some issues. And I also think I didn’t retain as much from this book for a number of reasons. One, I hadn’t the experience with the Excel statistically analysis tools to start with. Two, I’d only ever really just installed R and not ever used it seriously. Three, listening to Excel formulas being read out isn’t the best way to understand the topic.
I do still want to learn R but I haven’t got a data set that I need to do something with and my work doesn’t lend itself to data-oriented analysis. I have a book that has been on my reading list for a while and I did indeed start reading it in 2017 that talks about how to measure anything. One area that the statistically analysis might be interesting would be project estimation and I even heard a podcast the other day that was on using the Monti Carlo method to help estimating software projects… something to look at in the future?
Breadth, Depth and Form 