Improvement Insights Blog

People ask me if QI Macros can generate random samples or do sampling and I say no. Excel’s Data Analysis Toolpak can already do that. Discover how:

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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“People call in sometimes and say, ‘Do you have a tool in QI Macros to do random samples of data?’ I say, ‘No, because that’s already built into Excel. I try not to do anything Excel really does naturally.’ Most people are unaware that there’s a Data Analysis Tool Pack and you can add that into Excel and you can do things like create sample data with plus or minus so many standard deviations. You can [create] a random sample [for] something.

“I was looking at one data set and it was 150,000 rows of data. Well, we can’t plot all of that, so I had one of two choices: Do a random sample to get something that I could turn into a control chart or histogram, or I could summarize all that data by hour (or something like that) so that I could actually get down to something that you could actually plot.

“But this is the thing: Excel has these tools in there. Figure out how to install the Data Analysis Tool Pack and start using some of the tools in there to do the things that you need to do that we don’t do in QI Macros.

“Let’s go out and improve something this week.”