Even if youre going to use only one of the chi-square functions, read through all three function descriptions.

Viewed as a set of statistical tools, the functions make quite a bit more sense.

The chi-square value equals the sum of the squared standardized scores.

With six possibilities, you might expect that in a large sample, each of the six possibilities would appear roughly one-sixth of the time.

In this case, you might expect that each slot machine possibility appears 30 times because 1806 equals 30.

If you built a worksheet fragment like this one, you could analyze the one-armed bandit.

For example, the value in cell D2 is calculated using the formula (B2C2)2C2 to return the value 3.333333333.

With six possible outcomes on the slot machine, you have five degrees of freedom.

Therefore, if you want to calculate the chi-square thats equivalent to a 0.010362338 level of significance, you could enter the following formula into cell D12.

Note that D10 is used as the first probability argument because that cell holds the level of significance calculated by the CHISQ.DIST function.

For example, in the case of the suspicious slot machine, you might say, Because its not possible to be 100-percent sure, well say that we want a 95-percent probability, which corresponds to a 5-percent level of significance.

Statisticians, not wanting to sound so earthy, have another phrase for this something-is-fishy conclusion: rejecting the null hypothesis.

He is the author of more than 100 books, including QuickBooks For Dummies and Quicken For Dummies.

Shortcut For Squared In Excel Mac