As a member of the Minitab Commercial Sales Team, I am actively involved in developing new and managing existing customer relationships.  I work with our Minitab users in the Southeast U.S. and frequently get a chance to meet folks face-to-face at tradeshows and conferences.

Before I came to Minitab, I worked as a product manager for a start-up software company that created innovative data analysis solutions for DNA researchers and scientists. My focus was on forensic DNA analysis software, which included lots of "who done its" and some paternity cases.

Prior to starting my civilian career, I...

Have you ever seen those commercials where people are walking at a slant because they haven't had their V8? 

I was reminded of these ads recently when I had the opportunity to visit one of our Minitab customers in Tampa, Fl.  During the visit, I presented a seminar on some Advanced Minitab Tips and Tricks* using the same content we have presented in some of our free webinars. 

One of the very first scenarios in the presentation walks through data cleanup in your Minitab worksheet. As I started, I literally had to stop the class to address the commotion this topic kicked up on one side of the...

It’s the holiday season, a time for volunteering and gift giving…and sharing!  In that same spirit, I thought it would be a perfect time to talk about sharing in Minitab.  As you may have picked up from other blog postings (see Stats Cat’s post on Minitab customization), there are lots of ways you can customize your Minitab to save time and create great looking presentations.  You can spend hours going through all of Minitab’s options choosing just the right settings to make your graphs and statistical output pop.  It would be a shame if you couldn’t share all that hard work with your...

In industry, it may be presses and CNC machines. In education, it may be computers and microscopes. In retail, it may be the forklifts in the warehouse. 

Regardless of your industry or the size of your business, in all likelihood you have one or more pieces of capital equipment that must be regularly maintained.  Typically these expensive pieces of equipment come with routine maintenance plans.  But what happens when, perhaps after a few years of running smoothly, the equipment starts showing signs of wear?  Perhaps it starts with just one small fix and all is well. Then it requires a few more...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration implemented new regulations in the pharmaceutical industry over the past several years. One focus of the FDA has been on quality in batch-to-batch production. Batch quality not only ensures safe product for consumers, but has the double benefit of saving pharma companies money.  It's a waste of time and money to go through the long process of manufacturing a large batch of a drug, only to throw it away on final inspection. 

The FDA’s Process Analytical Tools (PAT) regulations offer guidelines on how to incorporate quality throughout the manufacturing...

Traditionally, the pieces and parts for most anything we buy are designed and manufactured one-by-one and then assembled into the final product we see on store shelves.  Everything from cars and jet engines to sneakers and cell phones are produced this way.  With the advent of additive manufacturing or “3D printing,” that familiar formula may soon change.  In this process, a virtual design is fed into a 3D printer that constructs the object, layer by layer, until the finished good is fully produced. Since this is a WYSIWYG process, it is an excellent option for designers and development teams...

Do you have data in Microsoft Excel that gets updated on a daily or weekly basis? Instead of copy-and-pasting the entire dataset over to Minitab every time or hunting to find where you left off last time, what if you could open Minitab and all of the new data was automatically imported?

Let's look at some ways you can bring data into Minitab from Excel that will allow you to setup a more permanent connection between the two.  No more copy-and-paste!

Importing Data from Excel

To set up a connection between Minitab and Excel, we need to tell Minitab the file path (directories, folders, etc.) to...

With the National Association of Healthcare Quality’s annual conference starting in Tampa on September 20, I thought it would be apropos to talk about some features we added to Minitab Statistical Software based on feedback we received from previous NAHQ attendees.

Charting Rare Events

It is important, and increasingly required, for hospitals to monitor and record certain negative events that occur in hospitals.  Some examples include reporting on nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections, medication errors, patient falls, ventilator-associated pneumonias (VAP events), and other rare adverse...

Have you ever found yourself switching back and forth between a Microsoft Excel file and Minitab Statistical Software just to complete a single analysis? Which software will give me the accurate results I need quickly?

I decided to put a few important factors to the test—workflow, organization, quality focus, and help. The review below provides my own two cents on which software seems to work best in a different situations.

Creating Graphs with Raw Data Easily

Microsoft Excel is a general spreadsheet software program. It is great for compiling, sorting, and highlighting large amounts of data....

As a sales rep here at Minitab, I get a lot of questions from people who know they need Minitab but are just not sure which deployment option would be best for their organization. We offer a couple of different deployment options and payment schedules. One of our most popular license options is the multi-user license.

Multi-user licenses are concurrent-use licenses (sometimes referred to as "enterprise licensing"). Your IT folks would install the Minitab License Manager service on the server. The actual Minitab Statistical Software would be installed directly on your PC (and as many other...

Now that the 2012 Olympics has concluded, the sight of all those muscled athletes has me thinking about my own physical fitness.  I’m pretty active for a 30-something.  I try to hit the gym or pool daily and I’ve been working through the BeachBody, P90X and Insanity workout programs for the past three years. I feel pretty fit and healthy. That is why it was such a shock when I went to the doctor for my yearly physical and they gave me a report stating I was overweight. I thought, this cannot be!

As it turns out, my doctor’s office used the standard BMI calculation to diagnose me as overweight....

We’ve all experienced it: 10 or 15 co-workers sitting around a large wooden table…coffee steaming…notepads and pencils at the ready…a new project being presented... At some point, the project leader requests feedback or ideas from the group. Usually, someone will jump on the opportunity and immediately start voicing their opinion. Soon, whatever thoughts and questions you had start floating away as you listen to your colleague’s points.

I was interested to know why we experience this short-term memory loss, so I went online and found a PsyBlog post talking about how the phenomena is...

There are some sounds that are quintessential summertime…the whir of the lawnmower, shrieks of children splashing in the pool, the crackle of a campfire. I’m sure we could think of a hundred more. For me, one sound that comes to mind in particular is the chirp of crickets in the evening. In this blog we'll recreate an old country trick using cricket chirps and, I hope, learn some new Minitab tricks along the way!

Our story starts with Amos Dolbear, an American physicist and inventor who lived in the late 1800s. Dolbear invented several elements of the telephone and was, therefore, attuned to...