Our focus at Analyse-it has always been on the development and improvement of our software. While we provide extensive help, tutorials, and technical support for Analyse-it, one area we do not cover is training and consultancy. As many of you will know we are based in England in the United Kingdom, and providing training and consultancy is often done better locally, in-person.

Instead we partner with experts who can provide training and consultancy in various disciplines, in local language, and geographically near (or at least nearer) to our customers. You can always find a list of current consultant and training partners at

One of the experts we have had a long relationship with is Dr. Thomas Keller. Dr Keller is an independent statistician and has run for 15 years. One his many areas of expertise is the planning and evaluation of experiments for method validation and he has been involved in international working groups (IFCC, CLSI) in the fields of clinical chemistry and laboratory medicine. Dr. Keller was actually a customer and started to provide training in Analyse-it shortly after. His reputation is second to none in the industry and he has provided consultancy and training to many companies using Analyse-it. See an example of a offered by Dr. Keller. He also provides for anything from simple questions to full courses for individuals and small groups.

Today marks the 20^th birthday of Analyse-it.

It was December 1997 when we shipped the first disks containing Analyse-it to paying customers. In some ways it seems just like yesterday, but in other respects software development and Analyse-it has come so far in those 20-years.

As many of you know Analyse-it wasn’t our first foray into developing statistical software. My co-founder in Analyse-it, Simon Huntington, had previously developed . Astute was the first statistical add-in for Microsoft Excel, initially released in 1992 for Excel 4.0, and released a few months before Microsoft’s Data Analysis Toolpak which appeared in Excel 5.0.

We started developing Analyse-it in 1996. Astute was no longer available and so we started work on developing a replacement. We were just a start-up business, keen to get our first product to market and so worked 16 hour days, 6 days a week, for 18 months to build that first release of Analyse-it.

Software development back then was pretty brutal. It had improved leaps and bounds since the 1980s, when we started developing software, but it was still time-consuming and sheer hard (mental) work. The software development tools were relatively basic and computing power was a fraction of what it is today. We initially developed Analyse-it in C++, the only commercially-viable programming language back then, and although a very flexible programming language it was very easy to produce bug-ridden and hard-to-maintain software. Each addition or change to the software code during development took 5-10 minutes to compile before the software could be run (or tested) to see the results. Not quite as slow as the mainframe era, but in an iterative process such as software development it was still tediously slow. Compilation often failed, due to typos in the source code, which then needed to be corrected and compilation restarted. Finally when we had an executable we could then start debugging and testing it. Windows 95 was the operating system of choice, but wasn’t the most resilient. It was easy to crash Windows resulting in a reboot, reload of the software development tools, and so on. Another 15 minutes gone.

We are delighted to announce the addition of the Analyse-it Quality Control and Improvement Edition to the range of Analyse-it products.

The new edition includes the most impressive statistical process control (SPC) charts available in any Excel statistical software package, including Shewhart, Levey-Jennings, CUSUM, and EWMA charts. Process capability statistics and plots help you ensure a process is able to meet specifications. And Pareto plots help you identify the quality-related problems that need the most attention and let you monitor efforts to reduce them.

Screenshot: Xbar-R chart of a quality characteristic by phase with stratification.

Screenshot: Process capability plots by phase.

Screenshot: Pareto plot of failures with stratification and sorted by key plot.

The new release is currently available for pre-release beta testing. Anyone can download and test the new release, though you will need an active internet connection to use it as we monitor usage and reliability of the pre-release.

A critical feature of any analytical and statistical software is accuracy. You are making decisions based on the statistics obtained and you need to know you can rely on them.

We have documented our previously, but another good benchmark to test statistical software against is the NIST StRD. The Statistical Engineering and Mathematical and Computational Sciences Divisions of NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory developed datasets with certified values for a variety of statistical methods against which statistical software packages can be benchmarked. The certified values are computed using ultra-high precision floating point arithmetic and are accurate to 15 significant digits.

For more information about the NIST StRD see:

We tested version 4.00 of Analyse-it against the NIST StRD on an Intel Xeon dual processor PC.

No statistical package achieves perfect accuracy for all the tests and no one package performs best for every test. Most statistical packages use IEEE754 double precision (64bit) floating point arithmetic and due to finite precision, round-off, and truncation errors in numerical operations, are unable to obtain the exact certified value.

Probably the greatest concern when using statistical software is reliability. Is the software producing accurate, numerically correct results that have been validated?

It’s a very important question. Many of you work in FDA and regulated environments where the penalties for mistakes are very high. And those of you outside such environments are still making important business and research decisions using Analyse-it. It’s therefore imperative that the software you depend upon is developed to a professional standard, thoroughly tested and validated.

Today we are publishing details of the software development and validation process we use at Analyse-it, see:

For those of you working in regulated environments the document is essential to justify the use of off-the-shelf, third-party software.

For everyone else it explains exactly how Analyse-it is developed, tested and validated. You can use it as a checklist against which to judge the quality of alternatives. But be wary. Professional software development is complex and developing numerical software more so. We have over 25-years software development experience (each developer, not aggregate), and over 20-years developing statistical software.

Leeds, England (PRWEB) October 03, 2012 -- Analyse-it Software, Ltd. today announced a major new release of their popular , Analyse-it®. With support for Excel 2007, 2010 and the forthcoming Excel 2013, Analyse-it transforms Microsoft Excel into a cost-effective powerful statistical analysis and data visualization package. Statistics and plots are included for exploring and describing data, estimating parameters, testing hypotheses, uncovering relationships and fitting models.

"We’ve made major improvements to in Analyse-it 3.0", said Simon Huntington, Director of Statistical Products at Analyse-it. "The improvements make Analyse-it a serious rival to larger statistical packages costing up to 5 times the price. Unlike the alternatives though, Analyse-it lets you perform all your statistical analysis without having to leave, or export your data, from Microsoft Excel."

Amongst the hundreds of improvements, model fitting and regression analysis have been improved to support simple models such as linear, logarithmic, exponential and power regression and advanced models such as and . Relationships between variables can be visualized using the and partial residual leverage plots show the effect of each term when building the model. Residual plots, distribution plots, lag plots, and sequence plots are also included for checking model assumptions. And an influence plot helps to quickly identify outliers and influential points, based on Studentized residuals and Cook’s D.

The British government recently announced a 2.5% reduction in VAT (sales tax) on goods purchased from the United Kingdom (see ). UK VAT was previously 17.5%, but from the 1st December 2008 until the end of 2009 it has been reduced to 15%.

Like many businesses, last Monday, we implemented the change.

Customers in the United Kingdom who aren’t VAT exempt, and those of you in Europe who are not VAT registered and must pay VAT, will now pay only 15% VAT.

For customers outside Europe, including those of you in the USA, Canada, and Australia, UK VAT still does not apply and you can continue to purchase licences without paying UK sales tax.

We’re pleased to announce that from today we can accept payment in EUROs. You can now see prices for Analyse-it in EUROs, as well as British Pounds sterling, and US dollars (for customers in the USA & Canada).

The EURO is now the primary currency in Europe and many of our customers have asked us to accept EUROs. We can accept payment in EUROs by VISA, MasterCard or AMEX credit card, or by cheque or wire-transfer.

When paying by credit card, your card will be charged the exact amount in EUROs. There are no currency conversions so no charges are incurred. The price you see, in EUROs, is the exact price we will charge to your credit card.

For established organisations we are happy to accept purchase orders in EUROs and invoice in EUROs. The invoice can be paid by cheque or wire-transfer, directly in EUROs, avoiding currency conversion costs.

Depending on where you’re located, the way we spell “Analyse-it” may intrigue you. We chose the name in 1997 as it sounded active, a direction to analyse it! – similar to many product names of the time.

The name has served us well and hints as to what our business and product offers.

At the time we didn’t think such a simple name would cause so many headaches. Before you wonder, Analyse-it doesn’t mean anything offensive in other languages, but it can be spelt different ways:

If you’re from the US, the obvious spelling is “Analyze-it”. If English isn’t your first language, “Analise-it” or “Analize-it” seems to be the natural spelling. Then there’s the hyphen – with or without? Combined there are 16 variations.

The variations have sometimes caused customers to send e-mail to the wrong company, or made finding our web-site difficult. We’ve also had the occasional e-mail suggesting we can’t spell! One of the not-so polite e-mails went like this:

Thanks for stopping-by to read the inaugural post to the Analyse-it blog.

We’ve launched the to keep you up-to-date on what’s new at Analyse-it, what we’re working on, and to notify you when updates and new products are released. We’ll also blog about using Analyse-it, statistical analysis, and interpretation.

The best part about the blog is it’s a conversation -- a conversation between you, our visitors and customers, and us. After reading a post you can add your thoughts, suggestions, and comments. We’ll reply when necessary or other visitors can post their opinions to ignite the debate. Click the links at the end of each post to read comments or add your own.

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That’s about it for the first blog post. Please remember to subscribe, and please post a comment now to introduce yourself or let us know how you want the blog and Analyse-it to develop in future.