Excel is universally available in schools, and has many powerful statistical features that can be used surprisingly easily and with little previous experience of working with Excel.

One of the features of the new statistics coursework within the mathematics GCSE is that pupils are being expected to deal with complex data sets, where multiple variables are to be considered, and this is an area which

* Book on any Lighthouse Maths CPD course before the end of January 2007 and get a free annual licence from NAG’s Schools Excel Add-in to help support and enhance your statistics lessons http://www.nag.co.uk/info/nsea-lh has not traditionally been covered in textbooks.