From the course: Learning Minitab (version Minitab 17)

Input and organize data - Minitab Tutorial

From the course: Learning Minitab (version Minitab 17)

Start my 1-month free trial

Input and organize data

“

- [Voiceover] In this movie, I want to show you how to input and organize data in Minitab. With Minitab open, we see the session window up here, and the worksheet window here. Let's say you want to input data for delivery times from two locations. So we can type in the headings for these data, in C1 and C2, where C1 is delivery times. Notice I type heading in the gray row below C1 and C2, so let's say delivery time is 10.2 for location A, and with my clumsy fingers I type a B here let's say, and we get a stern warning from Minitab that this is not a valid numeric value, so we can go back and correct that. Notice also, that in column C2 we have the C2-T as the title of that column. The T stands for text. The reason is, we have text data in column two, whereas in column one all we have is numeric data. So let's say that's B. And there you have it. That's how you type in data, or input data in Minitab. Let's say you already have data in Excel or some other file. We can import that and copy that over into Minitab. So let's go to our Excel file, and here we have the data. Simply highlight headings and the data. You can do a copy and paste into Minitab, and put a cursor at the heading level, meaning the row below the common numbers, and paste. And there it is. So that's how you copy and paste data, or bring data in from outside onto Minitab. In these two columns we see that the actual delivery times are in column C1, and the identifier or subscript is in C2, to identify which location is the one performing it. Since all the data is in one column we call this stacked data. If you want to see the data in two columns, whereby you have delivery times of A in one column, and delivery times of B in a different column that's called unstacked data. To unstack data, simply go to Data, Unstack, and you're asked here what data do you want to unstack. Do you want to unstack delivery time? So we can select delivery time and click Select, or a faster way to do that is to double-click on delivery time. So let's do that again. Double-click, and the subscripts will be the identifier for location, in our case is in the column called location. So select that and double-click. You have a choice as to where you want to store the unstacked data. You can either store it in a separate, new worksheet, or you can put it in the last column after the current worksheet. Click OK. And there you have it. C3 and C4 now contain the delivery times for each location. You might ask why bother with stacked and unstacked data. It's because some Minitab commands require stacked data, while others may require unstacked data. In this course, we'll be using both stacked and unstacked data. So the example here shows you how to do just that. In this movie you learned how to input data, learned about data types, learned how to import data, and finally how to unstack columns of data. These basic skills will be useful in this course, and when you start using Minitab. Thank you.

Contents