The T-Test and Excel

It is often important to determine whether the differences in means measured are

significant, i.e. is there a REAL difference between the two mean values.

The t statistic was introduced by William Sealy Gosset for cheaply monitoring the
quality of beer brews ("Student" was his pen name). Gosset was a statistician for the
Guinness brewery in Dublin, Ireland, and was hired due to Claude Guinness's innovative
policy of recruiting the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to apply
biochemistry and statistics to Guinness' industrial processes. Gosset published the t
test in Biometrika in 1908, but was forced to use a pen name by his employer who
regarded the fact that they were using statistics as a trade secret. In fact, Gosset's
identity was unknown not only to fellow statisticians but to his employer — the
company insisted on the pseudonym so that it could turn a blind eye to the breach of
its rules.

There are a number of approaches to doing the t-test and for those that are
interested I suggest you consult the statistics literature, visit the web sites at the
end of this document or pay attention in your statistics subject. We will use Excel to
do the calculations for us. I am assuming you have entered your data in tw o columns,
one for one set of results and the next column for the second set of data.

• Click on “Tools”
• Then choose Data Analysis (if it does not appear it means you have not installed
it)
• Scroll down until you find t-test. You will note that there are 3 to choose from,
I suggest you choose the on highlighted in the figure below. Why? Because our
sample populations are not paired, and if you look at the standard deviations of
your two sample sets you will see that the variances (SD 2) will be different. In
fact there is not a big difference between all 3 for our test.

• Fill in the 2 data ranges from your spreadsheet as shown in the example below
 • Output options are up to you, here I have decided for the table to be put on the
current worksheet
• The end result is this:

We are interested in the “t Stat” and “t Critical two tail”. We require the two tail test
as we are not concerned whether one mean value is bigger or smaller than the other.
For the example shown, “t Stat” > “t Critical two tail”. This means that there is a
significant difference between the two means, in fact there is only a 1 in 1500 chance
that they are the same ( from “P(T<=t) two tail”). To use “statistician speak” - By
conventional criteria, this difference is considered to be statistically significant. In
general we are interested in a 95% confidence limit and if this is achieved we can say
there is a statistically significant difference between the 2 means, i.e. “P(T<=t) two
tail” ≤ 0.05. This is the “p” value referred to in the literature.

What would have happened if we chose equal variance?

Not a big difference here.
And for a paired test:

References:
Don’t spend too much time on this, you will do this in your statistics subject to a much
greater depth. It is important here that you realised that this sort of analysis exists
and we can get Excel to do it for us. The first and second references I find the most
useful.
http://projectile.is.cs.cmu.edu/research/public/talks/t-test.htm
http://www.biology.ed.ac.uk/research/groups/jdeacon/statistics/tress4a.html
http://www.graphpad.com/www/book/Choose.htm
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/stats/ttest.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student's_t-test.