Procesamiento estadístico de datos con Minitab y Harvard Graphics

When statistical work is carried out, especially through surveys, a large amount of data is usually collected. This data must be processed; This means that statistical procedures must be applied to the data to be organized, calculate statistics and plotted. Statistical computing packages or programs have been developed in order to make the application of such procedures easier and faster. This publication will explain the handling of two computing packages: the Minitab version 8 statistical package and the Harvard Graphics package. The Minitab version 8 package has applications for basic statistics, graphs, probabilistic distributions, parametric statistical inference, analysis of categorical variables, regression, and correlation, among others. Furthermore, with this package you can work in two ways: the first, directly using the so-called commands or instructions to perform certain processing; and the second, through a menu of options similar to that found in other packages such as Lotus 123, Excel, etc. Here, more emphasis will be placed on the use of commands, since it allows a more interactive work, as well as being more direct and fast. With Harvard Graphics the construction of the different graphic representations, which are necessary for an adequate description of the statistical data, will be explained. Harvard Graphics allows you to obtain graphics of better quality than those obtained with Minitab.