P.Mean: Statistical calculators on the web (created 2011-06-17). News: Sign up for "The Monthly Mean," the newsletter that dares to call itself average, www.pmean.com/news.

I was asked to evaluate a statistical calculator on the web produced by Dimensions Research, and I tested a few examples and it worked just fine. I don't recommend that people use these small statistical calculators regularly, for a variety of reasons which I will outline below. But I'm not the sort of person who would then refuse to look at and evaluate these sites out of a sense of maintaining some higher moral code of Statistics. These small calculators have their place, as long as you don't rely on them excessively. But a crisis emerged when the Dimensions Research webmaster decided to make major revisions to their website, and the particular calculator disappeared, either temporarily or permanently. So I was asked if there are any other simple statistical calculators out there on the web.

You can google "statistical calculators" and similar phrases, and you will get a variety of sites that maintain links to many of these simple calculators. Here is one that I like and that I have used in the past:

Webpage: John C. Pezzullo. Web Pages that Perform Statistical Calculations Excerpt: "The web pages listed below comprise a powerful, conveniently-accessible, multi-platform statistical software package. There are also links to online statistics books, tutorials, downloadable software, and related resources. All of these resources are freely accessible, once you can get onto the Internet." [Accessed on June 17, 2011]. http://statpages.org/.

Here's one that I hadn't seen before:

Webpage: Daniel Soper. The Free Statistics Calculators Website Excerpt: "These statistics calculators are free to be used by anyone in the research community at large. They are offered humbly in the hope that they will contribute in some small way to the advancement of science. I hope you find them to be useful!" [Accessed on June 17, 2011]. http://www.danielsoper.com/statcalc/.

There are some sites that offer whole bunches of statistical calculators, all by the same programmer:

Webpage: GraphPad Software. GraphPad QuickCalcs: free statistical calculators Description: A series of simple calculators for analysis of categorical and continuous data, as well as statistical distributions and random numbers. [Accessed on June 17, 2011]. http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/index.cfm.

Webpage: EasyCalculation. Online Calculation on STATISTICS Excerpt: "FREE Online Mathematics tools (convertor or calculater) are intended to make the calculation and conversion of math or logical or arithmetic problems and give simple solutions. These mathematics tools will also help you in learning and creating math problems. These are free tools, tutorials and are copyright materials." [Accessed on June 17, 2011]. http://easycalculation.com/statistics/statistics.php.

Webpage: UCLA Department of Statistics. SOCR: Statistics Online Computational Resource Description: Statistical calculators for oneway and twoway ANOVA, Chisquare tests,regression, survival analysis, and various nonparametric tests. [Accessed on June 17, 2011]. http://socr.ucla.edu/htmls/SOCR_Analyses.html.

Webpage: iFigure. Statistics Calculators Excerpt: "iFigure provides links to online calculators and worksheets. These are interactive, educational tools that provide information to help in planning, solving and making decisions for a multitude of problems and tasks that come up daily, such as buying a home, checking on your health, investing money, figuring business profits, making statistical comparisons, or calculating pump pressure. This article gives more examples of the wide range of situations for which online calculators are available. To find a tool, use the menu or search box at the top left of the page." [Accessed on June 17, 2011]. http://www.ifigure.com/math/stat/stat.htm.

Webpage: T.W. Kirkman. Statistics to Use Description: Online calculators for simple descriptive statistics, t-test, chisquare tests, ANOVA, Regression, and a few other methods. [Accessed on June 17, 2011]. http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/stats/Index.html.

Webpage: Richard Lowry. VassarStats: Statistical Computation Web Site Excerpt: "Welcome to the VassarStats website, which I hope you will find to be a useful and user-friendly tool for performing statistical computation. Each of the links in white text in the panel on the left will show an annotated list of the statistical procedures available under that rubric. The «Site Map» display below will show a complete list of all available items." [Accessed on June 17, 2011]. http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/VassarStats.html.

Some promising sites to replace the Dimensions Research site include the GraphPad and SOCR sites mentioned above and:

Webpage: AG Dean, KM Sullivan, MM Soe. OpenEpi: Open Source Epidemiologic Statistics for Public Health, Version 2.3.1. Excerpt: "OpenEpi provides statistics for counts and measurements in descriptive and analytic studies, stratified analysis with exact confidence limits, matched pair and person-time analysis, sample size and power calculations, random numbers, sensitivity, specificity and other evaluation statistics, R x C tables, chi-square for dose-response, and links to other useful sites." [Accessed on June 28, 2011]. http://www.openepi.com/OE2.3/Menu/OpenEpiMenu.htm.

Webpage: University of Amsterdam. IFA Services: Statistics, Chi-square equal distributions Excerpt: "This is the most widely used test on nominal data. Although the observations (i.e., the numbers) are bi- or multi-nomial distributed, it is impractical to calculate the levels of significance directly. Binomial distributions can be approximated by a normal distributions if the expected number of observations is large enough." [Accessed on June 28, 2011]. http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/Service/Statistics/EqualDistribX2.html.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2011-01-01. Need more information? I have a page with general help resources. You can also browse for pages similar to this one at Incomplete pages.