Re: counting query

Joris Dobbelsteen wrote:

> Personally I've found nothing that will beat Excel for doing data
> analysis. Learn to use the pivot table and pivot charts. They are
> extremely powerful.

Funny, there is an on-going discussion about this on one of our
internal mailing lists.  Excel is perhaps okay for simple analysis,
and drawing pretty pictures, but the statistics routines, necessary
for any kind of detailed analysis, have historically had lots of
problems.  Here're a few explications of the many ways Excel seems to
fall down:

   http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jcryer/JSMTalk2001.pdf
   http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelreg.pdf

- John Burger