By Dale Farris, Reviews Coordinator
Golden Triangle PC Club
September 2007

Program Overview

MINITAB Statistical Software is the ideal package for six sigma and other quality improvement projects, as well as for all statistics. From statistical process control to design of experiments, it offers you the methods you need to implement every phase of your quality project, along with features like StatGuide and ReportPad that help you understand and communicate your results. No package is more accurate, reliable, or easy to use.

Minitab Statistical Software gives you the tools you need to analyze your data and make informed decisions about how to improve your business. Its power and ease of use make it the leading package used for quality improvement and statistics education worldwide.

Minitab 15.1.1 contains nearly 50 enhancements with minimal changes to the interface, making it simple for current users to access all the new features.

Top 15 Enhancements in Minitab 15.1.1

Assign formulas to a column or stored constant; columns update when data in the worksheets change
Multiple Undo/Redo in Data window
Enhanced calculations capabilities
New Currency and Percentage formats for data
Password protection for project files
Power (OC) curves for power and sample size
Easily generate your Gage R&R worksheet
Type 1 Gage Study
Gage R&R: Probability of a False Answer
Acceptance Sampling
Optimal general factorial designs
Probability Distribution Plot
Warranty Analysis
Powerful customization capabilities
Improved Glossary

Minitab Statistical Software is also available in other languages.

Minitab Features

Minitab 15 is simple to use for the beginning or occasional user, but also contains the depth and breadth of tools and guidance to satisfy even the most rigorous quality improvement projects. This latest new version 15.1.1 is also now compatible with Windows Vista.

Here's an outline of the many features you'll find in this release:

Easy to Use
Minitab's logical interface makes it simple to use, and its outstanding support features make it easy to get results.

Data and File Management
Minitab accepts data in many file formats and keeps your work tidy in a single, automatically organized project file.

State of the Art Graphs and Graph Editing
Clear, bold graphs are simple to create for any application, with intuitive point and click editing.

General Statistics
A broad range of simple yet powerful tools to help you to make quick assessments and comparisons.

Regression Analyses
Linear, polynomial, logistic, PLS and more detect and define relationships. Analysis of Variance

A comprehensive set of tools including ANOVA, GLM, Analysis of Means, and more.

Statistical Process Control
Take control of your processes with this suite of control charts and more.

Quality Tools
Ensure your processes meet your expectations with Process Capability analyses, Pareto charts, and other powerful tools.

Measurement Systems Analysis
Gage analyses and related tools to ensure the quality of your data.

Design of Experiments
A wide variety of available designs – now including D-optimal and distance based designs.

Reliability/Survival Analysis
Calculate the lifespan of the products you use or sell, predict failure rates, establish warranty parameters, and more.

Power and Sample Size
Collect the right amount of data for your situation – use power curves to visualize the relationship between the sample size and power.

Multivariate Analysis
Principal component analysis, cluster analysis, and other multidimensional tools.

Time Series and Forecasting
Large collection of time-related analyses, like trend analysis and decomposition. Now with auto, partial, and cross correlations.

Nonparametrics
Perform critical analyses even without normally distributed data.

Tables
Chi-square, Fisher's exact, and other table-based tools.

Simulations and Distributions
Generate random numbers, pick random samples, and more.

Macros and Customizability
Automate the analyses you perform regularly, customize menus and settings, even integrate with Minitab COM objects.

Easy to Use
Eager to reap the benefits of quality statistics in your organization, but wary of learning new software? Minitab is so easy to use it's the popular choice among professionals and students alike whose focus is on solving problems, not learning to navigate another piece of software.

Intuitive interface
All Minitab commands are organized in a logical way that compliments textbooks and training manuals to match the way you learn and work. Straightforward dialogs produce clear, uncluttered results. Built-in guidance you'll want to use With detailed Help on every dialog box, a quick clarification or even an in-depth explanation is always a click away. And once you've performed your analysis, use StatGuide to explain the statistical terms, tables, and graphs in a practical, easy-to-understand manner. Acclaimed, free technical support Have a question about using Minitab? Users have unlimited access to our team of experienced statistical specialists. The online Minitab Customer Center makes it easy to log a technical support issue, register a product, or update your contact information.

Data and File Management
Minitab makes it easy to use data from outside sources and manages your work automatically so you can spend more time analyzing your data– not struggling with it.

Use data from other applications
Data sets in Excel, HTML spreadsheet, or even Notepad? It's easy to import (or copy and paste) data from any number of sources for quick analysis by Minitab. One Project file holds it all

Create as many graphs, worksheets, or analyses as you like – Minitab's Project Manager will automatically organize them for you into a single, convenient project file. You can even use password protection to keep sensitive projects under wraps.

Powerful Data Window
The Minitab data window offers many advanced features you already know how to use, like associating formulas with columns. Sophisticated yet simple data manipulation allows you to organize your data any way you like.

State of the Art Graphs and Graph Editing
Minitab's immense collection of dynamic graphs and graphics tools are second to none in the industry.

Graph galleries
Choose the graph you want to create through illustrated galleries. Graphs that never become outdated. Adding this month's figures or correcting that data entry error? You can choose to update your graphs automatically as data change, or manually on a case-by-case basis.

Easy, powerful editing
Just double-click the item you'd like to edit and you'll prompt item-specific editing dialogs—there's no wading through choices for the right item. Want to change the font size of a graph title? Just double-click it. Care to rescale a graph axis? Just double-click it. You can edit virtually everything on a Minitab graph, from the color of your data points to the fit on your scatterplot.

General Statistics
Minitab includes the full range of basic statistical procedures used for simple estimation and hypothesis testing with one or two samples. These often form the foundation for more advanced investigation. Among them are descriptive statistics and graphics, hypothesis tests and confidence intervals, variance, and association.

Regression Analyses
Does an increase in advertising dollars correspond with an increase in sales? Can a machine's malfunction rate be predicted by a combination of speed and humidity? Regression analysis allows you to investigate and model the relationship between a response variable and one or more predictors. Minitab offers a broad range of regression commands including least squares, partial least squares, and logistic regression procedures.

Analysis of Variance
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is a means of evaluating the effect of factors on a process. For example, you can use ANOVA to find the optimal settings for manufacturing equipment, the factor or combination of factors accounting for production errors, and more.

Minitab's collection of ANOVA capabilities include procedures for choosing ANOVA models, for fitting MANOVA models (multiple response), and ANOM models (analysis of means). It also includes graphs for testing equal variances, confidence interval plots, and graphs of main effects and interactions.

Statistical Process Control
Minitab offers many tools to help you map out and detect problems in your processes, regardless of your requirements. SPC tools like control charts allow you to keep track of process statistics over time and identify the special causes that might threaten your procedure.

Control charts for measurement and attribute data, individuals and subgroups, give you the power to monitor any process

Quality Tools
Minitab offers a number of hard and soft tools to help you detect and eliminate quality problems. Minitab's quality tools can help with a wide variety of tasks, from capability analysis to Pareto charts.

You spend a great deal of time and money taking careful measurements to ensure the highest levels of quality. But how accurate are the tools you use to make those measurements? You need to identify sources of variation, and ensure that the variation you observe isn't due to a lack of precision and accuracy in your measurement system.

Minitab offers a full suite of Measurement Systems Analysis commands to help you determine if your measurement system makes the grade, as well as how to go about correcting it if it doesn't.

Design of Experiments
Systematic experimentation is crucial to investigating the factors that influence product quality. After identifying these factors, you can make adjustments to processes or formulations that immediately enhance a product's manufacturability, reliability, quality, and field performance.

Well-designed experiments can produce significantly more information in less time and for much less money than haphazard or unplanned experiments. Minitab's DOE gives you the tools to create experimental designs and analyze and plot the results to help you improve your processes quickly and efficiently.

Reliability/Survival Analysis
One of the most fundamental marks of quality is how long a product lasts before it must be replaced or repaired. Understanding your product's reliability can turn a potential liability into a business advantage.

Minitab's Reliability and Survival Analysis tools help you to understand the lifetime characteristics of a product or part. You can use growth curves to analyze life data from a repairable system (where parts are replaced in order to repair an entire system), or regression with life data commands to predict failure time due to one or more predictors. Warranty analysis can help you keep your promises to your customers while protecting your bottom line. And accelerated life testing lets you investigate the relationship between failure time and predicting factors in a fraction of the time (and cost) associated with life data

Power and Sample Size
More data often means a better, more powerful analysis. But how far do you need to go to achieve the results you demand? Minitab's Power and Sample Size capabilities allow you to calculate the sample size needed to achieve a given power value, and vice versa. And now with power curves you can visualize the dynamic relationship between power and sample size.

Multivariate Analysis
Multivariate analysis procedures are used to better understand your data when you have made multiple measurements on items or subjects. Minitab gives you the tools to:

Identify the factors most responsible for the data's underlying structure Group observations in "clusters" to discover the simple structures in complex data, or to investigate how the predictors contribute to the groupings Examine how the categories of different variables are related to one another

Time Series and Forecasting
Forecasting is based on the idea that reliable predictions can be achieved by modeling patterns in a time series plot, and then extrapolating those patterns to the future. Because these patterns may not be immediately apparent, Minitab fits to an appropriate model according to seasonality and trend.

Nonparametrics
Many statistical procedures gain a degree of power by assuming that data follow a given distribution—usually the normal distribution. A nonparametric test makes no such assumption, and so results are more robust against violations of distribution. If assumptions are violated for a test based upon a parametric model, you might choose to perform a nonparametric test.

Minitab offers the following nonparametric procedures: 1-sample median test (sign test and Wilcoxon test) 2-sample median test (Mann-Whitney test) Analysis of variance (Kruskal-Wallis, Mood's median, and Friedman test) Test for randomness (runs test) Pairwise statistics (pairwise averages, pairwise differences, and pairwise slopes

Tables
Minitab's Tables summarize data into tables and perform analyses on the tabled data. You can:

Display a table of counts, cumulative counts, percents, and cumulative percents for each specified variable. Display one-way, two-way, and multi-way tables containing descriptive statistical summaries of data for categorical variables and associated variables. Display one-way, two-way, and multi-way tables containing count data to test if the probabilities of items or subjects being classified for one variable depend upon the classification of the other variable. Test for dependence (with Fisher's Exact Test) among characteristics in a two-way classification. Compute a variety of measures of association.

Simulations and Distributions
Minitab lets you obtain random samples, generate random data, and calculate probabilities for an enormous variety of distributions. Useful for:

Randomly sampling rows from one or more columns in your worksheet Generating random data from 24 different distributions Calculating a critical value for a hypothesis test, rather than looking it up in a table Calculating a p-value for a hypothesis test

Macros and Customizability
For the ultimate in flexibility, there are numerous ways to personalize and automate Minitab.

Create Custom Menus and Toolbars
Adjust Minitab menus and toolbars, or create your own that feature only the tools you use regularly.

User Profiles
You can customize your own User Profile—from the color and font of graph titles to stepwise regression parameters— by changing and saving settings in Minitab. What's more, you can share your profile with individual coworkers or the entire company to maintain consistency.

Automate with Macros
Write your own macros to simplify the tasks you perform regularly.

Minitab COM-enabled Automation
Integrate Minitab as a behind the scenes engine in your custom application.

MyMenu
Allows your programmers to customize Minitab. Use it to add specialized functionality to the Minitab menu, including customized interfaces to corporate databases, company-created macros, and specialized reports.

Uses For Minitab 15

Minitab 15 is simple to use for the beginning or occasional user, but also contains the depth and breadth of tools and guidance to satisfy even the most rigorous quality improvement projects. Here's an outline of the many features you'll find in this release:

Easy to Use
Minitab's logical interface makes it simple to use, and its outstanding support features make it easy to get results.

Data and File Management
Minitab accepts data in many file formats and keeps your work tidy in a single, automatically organized project file.

State of the Art Graphs and Graph Editing
Clear, bold graphs are simple to create for any application, with intuitive point and click editing.

General Statistics
A broad range of simple yet powerful tools to help you to make quick assessments and comparisons.

Regression Analyses
Linear, polynomial, logistic, PLS and more detect and define relationships.

Analysis of Variance
A comprehensive set of tools including ANOVA, GLM, Analysis of Means, and more.

Statistical Process Control
Take control of your processes with this suite of control charts and more.

Quality Tools
Ensure your processes meet your expectations with Process Capability analyses, Pareto charts, and other powerful tools.

Measurement Systems Analysis
Gage analyses and related tools to ensure the quality of your data.

Design of Experiments
A wide variety of available designs– now including D-optimal and distance based designs.

Reliability/Survival Analysis
Calculate the lifespan of the products you use or sell, predict failure rates, establish warranty parameters, and more.

Power and Sample Size
Collect the right amount of data for your situation– use power curves to visualize the relationship between the sample size and power.

Multivariate Analysis
Principal component analysis, cluster analysis, and other multidimensional tools.

Time Series and Forecasting
Large collection of time-related analyses, like trend analysis and decomposition. Now with auto, partial, and cross correlations.

Nonparametrics
Perform critical analyses even without normally distributed data.

Tables
Chi-square, Fisher's exact, and other table-based tools.

Simulations and Distributions
Generate random numbers, pick random samples, and more.

Macros and Customizability
Automate the analyses you perform regularly, customize menus and settings, even integrate with Minitab COM objects.

In addition to more statistical power than in any previous release, MINITAB 15 offers many exciting features, such as:

A powerful new graphics engine that delivers engaging results that offer tremendous insight into your data

An effortless method to create, edit, and update graphs

The ability to customize your menus and toolbars so you can conveniently access the methods you use most

Release 15 also has a powerful, new graphics system that redefines ease of use and delivers stunning and informative data visualizations. Highlights include:

A pictorial gallery that makes selecting the right graph quick and easy

The ability to modify any graph attribute - fonts, colors, shapes, etc., - and save preferences as default settings for future graphs

A dynamic link between a graph and its worksheet that lets you update the graph automatically when you add or change data

The ability to place several graphs together in one window for easy comparison

Appearance and ease-of-use enhancements to almost all graphs in MINITAB

Importance of MINITAB 15

For over 30 years, MINITAB Statistical Software has provided quick, easy, and reliable data analysis solutions for people in both business and academia. From scientists to students, engineers to nurses, MINITAB offers solutions to users at every level.

Originally developed in 1972 to help professors teach basic statistics, MINITAB is now used in more than 4,000 colleges and universities around the world and is referenced in nearly 450 textbooks. Easy to use and easy to learn, MINITAB is the statistical software package professors trust. More students have learned statistics using MINITAB than any other package.

As any student new to the field of statistics knows, quickly adapting to the thinking required in statistics is not necessarily easy for every student. To the rescue comes software that is designed to assist the student with the many times laborious, tedious arithmetical calculations required of today's many statistical tools. The research process is now highly dependent on computer automation of the data analysis process, and MINITAB has long proven itself as the software application of choice in countless statistics classes in colleges and universities all over the world.

MINITAB is also now widely used in the business world, offering accurate and easy-to-use tools for quality control, DOE, reliability/survival analysis, and general statistics. With their MINITAB Quality Companion 2, Minitab, Inc. now firmly establishes its role as the premier provider of software that provides statistical analyses of all kinds, graphical presentation of data, and tools used by quality professionals in their product/service improvement work.

While MINITAB has long been the statistical analysis tool of choice in countless colleges and universities, the company's entry into the world of quality improvement, SPC, and DOE tools that more directly meet the needs of business and industry, versus research analysis, has added strength to this already soundly successful company. In my opinion, this indicates the awareness of the company leaders that they cannot assume that their prior many years of success in the world of research analysis will automatically result in continued future success. In today's highly competitive international business, continuous improvement and adaptation of operations to the ever changing market also applies to successful software developers.

Targeted Customers

MINITAB 15 has wide application in just about any business, in addition to its obvious superior application in all levels of statistics classes in colleges and universities. What's more, the company has long set itself apart in the world of statistical analysis tools by providing very successful student packages of MINITAB that are deeply discounted in price to meet the special needs of students. The academic pricing approach also meets the special needs of those in academia needing multiple licensing in order to establish the program in their numerous statistics classes.

You can use the program to best understand the quality of your product and to ensure that your process continues to produce the quality demanded by customers. Students will want to give serious consideration to MINITAB 15 as the most feature rich statistical analysis tool now available. University professors teaching statistics classes, research methodology classes, or are heavily involved in funded research will also find MINITAB 15 a superior tool for their use in analysis of their data.

While the program is certainly not relevant to novice computer users, or those with minimal understanding of experience with statistics, there are indeed many customers who regularly are involved in the use of these data analysis tools. The use of MINITAB does assume familiarity with the basic mathematical calculations involved with these numerous tools, along with an understanding of the types of data to be used with these tools.

The major benefit to users is MINITAB's speedy mathematical calculations that form the foundation of all the hundreds of statistical tools that are included in the program. Once students understand the basics of the mathematical expressions and how to manually perform these analyses, then very quickly they will appreciate the power and ease of using MINITAB to help them speed up this many times laborious, time consuming stage in the research process.

In addition, all international companies competing around the globe for customers will find MINITAB 15 an essential tool in their ongoing ISO certification commitment, and in assuring their decisions made based on data can be confidently supported by the unqualified capabilities of the program.

Certainly in laboratory settings, MINITAB 15 has powerful application, and should be seriously considered by lab technicians, as well as scientists leading their various research teams.

Price

$1,195 for one site license

Contact the company for further information about multiple user license pricing and their special pricing for instructors and students. With the program's strong relevance and value to all institutions of higher learning, I suggest academicians strongly consider looking into these special price points, in order to ensure that students, teachers, and researchers have access to this powerful program that will meet all their data analysis needs.

System Configuration Requirements

Windows 2000, XP, or Vista
1GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
512MB RAM
125MB free hard disk space
1024 x 768 or higher resolution monitor
Adobe Reader 5 or higher required for Meet Minitab

Multi-user licenses only: Multi-user installations also require Minitab License Manager.

With the power and complexity of this software, and the potential for hugely complex data analysis tools in the program, many customers may wish to consider running this powerful program on a "high-end" machine, with as fast a processor you can manage, along with as much RAM and free hard disk space you also can manage.

About Minitab, Inc.

Minitab Inc. creates and markets statistical software that enables those who teach or perform data analysis to obtain accurate, reliable, and easy-to-use solutions. For over 30 years, MINITAB Statistical Software has provided quick, easy, and reliable data analysis solutions for people in both business and academia. From scientists to students, engineers to nurses, MINITAB offers solutions to users at every level.

Originally developed in 1972 to help professors teach basic statistics, MINITAB is now used in more than 4,000 colleges and universities around the world and is referenced in nearly 450 textbooks. Easy to use and easy to learn, MINITAB is the statistical software package professors trust. More students have learned statistics using MINITAB than any other package.

MINITAB Statistical Software also has become widely used in the business world, offering accurate and easy-to-use tools for quality control, DOE, reliability/survival analysis, and general statistics. MINITAB is now the tool of choice for businesses of all sizes and is used in 80 countries throughout the world, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, including Ford Motor Company, 3M, Honeywell International, General Motors, and leading Six Sigma consultants.

Contact Information

Eston Martz
Media Relations
Minitab, Inc.
Quality Plaza
1829 Pine Hall Road
State College, Pennsylvania 1601-3008
814-238-3280, Ext. 270
FAX 814-238-2035
emartz@minitab.com
info@minitab.com
www.minitab.com