Development of a new function in ms Excel to assess differences between sample groups

Abstract

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Statistical analysis plays a crucial role in several areas, including engineering, where it helps in making impartial decisions to optimize production processes. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is often used to compare sample groups, allowing the simultaneous evaluation of several means, although it does not identify which groups differ from each other. Post-hoc tests, such as Tukey's test, solve this problem, but their reliability decreases with larger amounts of groups. In this work, a new function was developed for Microsoft (MS) Excel, taking advantage of integration with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), to simplify direct comparisons between sample groups. This function makes it possible to perform an ANOVA for two sample groups based on the provided size, mean, and standard deviation, generating the P value as a result, which can be directly compared to the significance level adopted by each user. The developed function proved to be effective and resulted in significant productivity gains due to its integration with native MS Excel functions.