Thanks, everyone, for weighing in on this. Based on your feedback and my experimenting with the Excel solutions, I'm staying with SPSS. The data structure is simple and doesn't require a lot of restructuring given
the data sets I assign for analysis while Excel does. There's a lot of copy/paste to get Excel data in the structure necessary to do the analyses, and every time data is entered/re-entered, the likelihood of errors increases; and additionally, the necessary
structure isn't vey intuitive at all. And as David mentioned, there's no way to trace the errors. Thanks again.
I have encountered programs where SPSS have been abandoned in favor of Excel. And the teachers seem to end up with a messy set of functions and use of Analysis Toolpak, which for the students usually makes the courses a matter of dealing with Excel technicalities. Frustrating, and as for the ambition to make students learn about research methods, it is not a sound way to do so.
My advice has always been to reconsider the use of Excel, with the added comment that if they have to stick with Excel they would probably do much better by using Excel for the summary measures you can build with “Pivot Tables” in Excel followed by use of web sites such as openepi.com. Most of the Excel function could and should be avoided. My experience is that this gives students the chance to work with statistics rather than with Excel.
Robert
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