1. Getting Started with Minitab

MINITAB is a general-purpose statistical computing system designed especially for people with little or no previous computer experience. It is easy to use, flexible, and quite powerful. This document describes how to access MINITAB on the public UNIX workstation clusters at Duke and how to use MINITAB to obtain descriptive statistics.

As a first example, this will show you how you can upload the data for the first problem in homework 1. Files with examples and exercises from Berry are in the directory 
      /afs/acpub.duke.edu/users9/gparm/110B/minitab
The minitab worksheet for problem 2.20 are in a file called First copy the data file to your account: 
      /afs/acpub.duke.edu/users9/gparm/110B/minitab/ex_2_20.MTW
in that directory. First copy the data file to your current directory: 
  cp /afs/acpub.duke.edu/users9/gparm/110B/minitab/ex_2_20.MTW ex_2_20.MTW
(remeber that UNIX is "case sensitive" so upper case letters are important). To make sure the cp command (think: copy) did what you intended it to do, use the command 
      ls
The ls command (think: list) shows a list of all files in your current directory.

Now you are ready to start Minitab. Type: 

	minitab
You should get the Minitab prompt "MTB >" . First we need to read the data into Minitab: 
	retrieve 'ex_2_20.MTW'
will load the entire worksheet with the data set, labelled variables etc that come with problem 2.20. Now you are ready to start your homework. The appendix to Chapter 2 describes the minitab commands you will need.

To save your work, you can type 

	outfile 'myhomework'
at the minitab prompt. From that point on, minitab will save everything that you see on your screen on a file called myhomework.LIS (blunders and error messages included ---you may need to do some tidying up before you turn your assigment in. Use a text editor). Saving will continue until you type either 
	nooutfile
or 
	stop
to end the session entirely.

On-line help

The help command gives you an on-line help facility. Type 
	help commands
to get a listing of possible commands by categories. Try 
	help commands 5
to get a list of all commands for plotting, and 
	help hist
for an explaination of the hist command.