Resampling Calculations in a Spreadsheet

With the advent of high-speedpersonal computers, resamplingprocedures are now a realistic alternative to the traditional parametric approach to problems in statistics such as confidence intervals and hypothesis test-ing. The interested reader is referred to Efron and Tibshirani (Effron & Tibshiravi, 1993) or Simon (Simon, 1997) for an intro-duction to resampling techniques. There are a variety of software packages available to execute resampling procedures including SAS, S, S-PLUS, and Resampling Stats. How-ever, to my knowledge, nobody has dem-onstrated the usefulness of spreadsheets for resampling. In this column article I show how resampling calculations can be done within an Excel spreadsheet