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 handout 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, use Minitab to summarize the following data. The data give traffic death rates (per 100 mio motor vehicle miles) for each of the 50 states.

          6.4               7.1                    4.5
          8.8               4.6                    5.0
	  ....

The data are in file /afs/acpub/project/sta215/traffic.data. First copy the data file to your account:

      cp /afs/acpub/project/sta215/traffic.data traffic.data

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 account--- at this moment probably only the file traffic.data which you just copied.

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:

	set 'traffic.data' c1

The set command reads the data from file traffic.data into the Minitab column c1. Don't forget the single quotes around the file name! Look at the column c1:

	print c1

Turn to page one-sample data for some descriptive statistics for this data set.

On-line help

Instead of "set 'traffic.data' c1" we could have also used

	read 'traffic.data' c1

Look at

	help read

and

	help set

to find out the difference between the two commands.

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.

peter@acpub

Last modified 12/1/95