120MP Lab 6 Summarising Data in Minitab

To start Minitab, you either select it from the Programs menu or use the Software Portal

The bottom half of the screen is the Data Window, where you enter the data.
The top half of the screen is the Session Window, where your output tables etc will appear

Data input
The data can be typed directly into the Data Window, or it can be copy and pasted from other sources
such as an Excel spreadsheet.
Note that in Minitab the column labels (variable names) are placed in the grey cells above the
“worksheet” not in Row 1 (as you would in Excel).

Open the spreadsheet Maths_English.xls and copy the data into Minitab

Columns can be referred to either by their name,

e.g. Gender, or by their number, e.g. C1.

The T after a column header indicates that

Minitab regards the data as Text - and therefore
unusable for numerical calculations.

Summary Statistics
From the main menu select
Stat > Basic Statistics > Display Descriptive Statistics

Click in the Variables box.

Either
double-click on Maths in the list in the box on the left

Or type Maths

Or type C2

Click OK

120MP Lab6 1
Output
Output appears initially in the Session Window.

Exercise
 Calculate summary statistics including Range and Skewness, for English.
 Use the By variables to produce separate English statistics for males and females.
 Use Graph > Boxplot >English> Multiple Y’s Simple > OK > Multiple Graphs
to produce a boxplot comparing the English marks of males and females.

Session Folder
Ctrl+Alt+M (or click on ) brings up the Session Folder. Simply double-click on an item in the
list to navigate to a particular part of the voluminous output in the Session Window.

To include output in a report, right-click on an item in the list and select Append to Report.

Report Pad
Ctrl+Alt+R (or click on ) brings up the Report Pad. This is a crude word-processor that allows
you to write a report around Minitab’s statistical output. Use the Editor menu for effects.

Saving
Via the File menu Minitab allows you to save:
 The Project (filename .MPJ) – data, output, settings, the lot
 The Worksheet (filename .MTW) – data window in Minitab format (or optionally XLS)
 The Session (filename .TXT) – session window as a text file (or optionally RTF or HTML)
 The Report (filename .RTF) – report pad as a word-processed document (optionally HTML)

.
Minitab Practice Exercise
120MP Lab6 2
Open the file pulse.xls which contains data from the following experiment:

92 randomly chosen students were asked to count their pulse rate for one minute and record it. They
were then asked to toss a coin and if they obtained a head they were to run on the spot for one minute,
otherwise to sit resting. All students then counted their pulse rates again. The columns of data are self-
explanatory apart from the fact that Height is in inches, Weight is in pounds and Activity is the student’s
typical level of physical exercise.

Import the data into Minitab and use the program to answer the following questions.
(Note that some of the output needed to answer these has deliberately not been covered above- you will
need to work out how to obtain these from Minitab yourself!)

1. What is the mean height of all the students?

2. What is the median weight of the male students?

What does it tell us?

3. What is the range of the female initial pulse rates?

4. How many students smoked?

5. What is the shape of the height distribution?

6. Compare the weight distribution of smokers and non-smokers with regard to:

Average

Spread

Shape

7. Did the student with the highest initial pulse rate run?

8. What is the relationship, if any, between height and weight?

(Clue: draw a scatterplot)

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9. What is the relationship (if any) between weight and level of activity?
(Clue: Compare averages)

10. What type of person has a high second pulse rate?

(Clue: Draw a scatter graph, use the brush icon to select the data, and then use Editor>Set ID
Variables)

11. How many female students smoked?

(Clue: Use Stat>Tables>Cross Tabulation)

12. What % of male students smoked?

13. What % of smokers were male?

14. What % of those with high exercise level ran?

15. How many smokers had a high exercise level?

16. Compare the mean initial pulse rate for female smokers and non-smokers.

17. Which level of exercise gave the heaviest men on average?

18. Were smokers or non-smokers the heaviest women on average?

19. Compare the mean increase in pulse rate between those who ran and those who sat
(Clue: First create a new variable ‘pulsechange’ using Calc>Calculator)

20. Finally, for the detectives among you, what is strange about the recorded pulse rates, and what is the
explanation?
(Clue: A stem-and-leaf plot might help.)

120MP Lab6 4