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5 Powerful Insights from Noted Quality Leaders
If you were among the 300 people who attended the first-ever Minitab Insights conference in September, you already know how powerful it was. Attendees learned how practitioners from a wide range of...
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Why Shrewd Experts "Fail to Reject the Null" Every Time
I watched an old motorcycle flick from the 1960s the other night, and I was struck by the bikers' slang. They had a language all their own. Just like statisticians, whose manner of speaking often...
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5 More Powerful Insights from Noted Quality Leaders
We hosted our first-ever Minitab Insights conference in September, and if you were among the attendees, you already know the caliber of the speakers and the value of the information they shared....
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Pareto Charts Revisited: The Full Truth about the Bars
A reader asked a great question in response to a post I wrote about Pareto charts. Our readers typically do ask great questions, but this one turned out to be more difficult to answer than it first...
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Improving Cash Flow and Cutting Costs at Bank Branch Offices
Every day, thousands of people withdraw extra cash for daily expenses. Each transaction may be small, but the total amount of cash dispersed over hundreds or thousands of daily transactions can be very...
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13 Scary Statistics Blog Posts for Halloween
With another Halloween almost upon us, here's a look back at some of the posts we've written about this holiday specifically, and about various creepy things in general. I hope that you enjoy this...
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8 Expert Tips for Excellent Designed Experiments (DOE)
If your work involves quality improvement, you've at least heard of Design of Experiments (DOE). You probably know it's the most efficient way to optimize and improve your process. But many of us find...
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How to Avoid Messing Up Your Pareto Charts
Pareto charts are a special type of bar chart you can use to prioritize almost anything. This makes them very useful in making sound decisions. For example, if you have several possible quality...
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Creating a Chart to Compare Month-to-Month Change
Minitab's LinkedIn group is a good place to ask questions and get input from people with experience analyzing data and doing statistics in a wide array of professions. For example, one member asked...
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Creating Charts to Compare Month-to-Month Change, part 2
A member of Minitab's LinkedIn group asked how to create a chart to monitor change by month, specifically comparing last year's data to this year's data. My last post showed how to do this using an...
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How to Explore Interactions with Line Plots
The line plot is an incredibly agile but frequently overlooked tool in the quest to better understand your processes.In any process, whether it's baking a cake or processing loan forms, many factors...
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17 Common Words with Precise Statistical Meanings...or, More Bewildering...
The language of statistics is a funny thing, but there usually isn't much to laugh at in the consequences that can follow when misunderstandings occur between statisticians and non-statisticians. We...
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How to Make Your Statistical Software Fit You Perfectly
Did you ever get a pair of jeans or a shirt that you liked, but didn't quite fit you perfectly? That happened to me a few months ago. The jeans looked good, and they were very well made, but it took a...
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How to Use Data to Understand and Resolve Differences in Opinion, Part 1
Opinions, they say, are like certain anatomical features: everybody has one. Usually that's fine—if everybody thought the same way, life would be pretty boring—but many business decisions are based on...
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How to Use Data to Understand and Resolve Differences in Opinion, Part 2
Previously, I discussed how business problems arise when people have conflicting opinions about a subjective factor, such as whether something is the right color or not, or whether a job applicant is...
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How to Use Data to Understand and Resolve Differences in Opinion, Part 3
In the first part of this series, we saw how conflicting opinions about a subjective factor can create business problems. In part 2, we used Minitab's Assistant feature to set up an attribute agreement...
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How to Compute Probabilities
Have you ever wanted to know the odds of something happening, or not happening? It's the kind of question that students are frequently asked to calculate by hand in introductory statistics classes, and...
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Three Common P-Value Mistakes You'll Never Have to Make
Statistics can be challenging, especially if you're not analyzing data and interpreting the results every day. Statistical software makes things easier by handling the arduous mathematical work...
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How to Use the "Swiss Army Knife" Control Chart
A recent discussion on the Minitab Network on LinkedIn pertained to the I-MR chart. In the course of the conversation, a couple of people referred to it as "The Swiss Army Knife of control charts," and...
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Creating and Reading Statistical Graphs: Trickier than You Think
My colleague Cody Steele wrote a post that illustrated how the same set of data can appear to support two contradictory positions. He showed how changing the scale of a graph that displays mean and...
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