XLR: A Free Excel Add-In for Introductory Business Statistics

Abstract

XLR is an Excel add-in that unifies the user friendly, widely popular interface of Excel with the powerful and robust computational capability of the GNU statistical and graphical language R. The add-in attempts to address the American Statistical Association’s comment that “Generic packages such as Excel are not sufficient even for the teaching of statistics, let alone for research and consulting.” R is the program of choice for researchers in statistical methodology that is freely available under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GPL) Agreement. By wedding the interactive mode of Excel with the power of statistical computing of R, XLR provides a solution to the problem of numerical inaccuracy of using Excel and its various internal statistical functions and procedures by harnessing the computational power of R. XLR will be distributed under the GNU GPL Agreement. The GPL puts students, instructors and researchers in control of their usage of the software by providing them with the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software, thus, freeing them from the bondage of proprietary software. The creation of XLR will not only have a significant impact on the teaching of an Introductory Business Statistics course by providing a free alternative to the commercial proprietary software but also provide researchers in all disciplines who require sophisticated and cutting edge statistical and graphical procedures with a user-friendly interactive data analysis tool when the current set of available commands is expanded to include more advance procedures.