1. Software families

1.1 General software: Excel example

Unlike dedicated software, general-purpose software such as Excel is presented as a "toolbox". Their advantage is that they are often already installed on machines, and therefore require no additional purchase.

They do offer some basic functions, but as the examples below illustrate, a certain amount of data preparation work is essential before you can solve even the most sophisticated requirements, such as histograms or distribution functions.

These limitations have paved the way for Excel "macro" libraries such as XLSTAT, some of whose features are marketed separately by different companies.

Finally, it's worth remembering that Excel has only 65,536 rows: either the sample...