Latest edition: The 8th edition, which is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2024, has the following changes:

• Chapter 4 on Excel’s “power” tools has been expanded to two chapters: the first on importing and transforming data with Power Query; the second on using Power Pivot, along with the DAX language, to create pivot table reports. Both chapters also have some coverage of these same tools in the free Power BI Desktop software.

• Chapter 17 on data mining has been expanded to two chapters: the first on classification and the second on clustering and market basket analysis.

• Chapters 7, 8, and 9 has been condensed into a single Statistical Inference chapter. This single chapter includes all the main concepts and many of the same examples, but in a more compact version.

• There are many appendices on the R programming language for those instructors who want to incorporate this popular language into their courses.

Note for StatTools users: One user recently complained that several example and solution files in Chapter 3 (and maybe Chapter 2?) of the 7th edition provide different values for medians and other percentiles than they obtain with StatTools. (Note that my solutions in the 7th edition don’t use StatTools. They use built-in Excel functions: MEDIAN, QUARTILE, and PERCENTILE.) The statistics literature provides several slightly different methods for calculating percentiles, including the median, and StatTools lets you choose which of these you prefer. You can make this choice from Application Settings under the Utilities dropdown. I doubt that many users will purposely choose a method other than the StatTools default, but such a choice could lead to slightly different answers. In any case, the differences should be negligible for all practical purposes. By the way, the reason for slightly different methods is due to small data sets. For example, the 10th percentile is not clearly defined (and probably not even relevant) in a data set with only 7 observations!