Doctoral Dissertation

[jsniderfamily]

I am looking for a topic using Microsoft Excel for my research dissertation.
Any topic suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[SydneyGeek]

Hi, and welcome to the Board!

It's a pretty broad question. Do you want to do the analysis in Excel? If so, what sort of data will you be generating? Will you be creating charts, pivot tables, or other outputs? Will the data be entered manually or will you be getting readings from one or more instruments?

Because every research program is unique there won't be a boiler plate solution for you, but you can certainly run the number crunching in Excel without problems. If you generate huge amounts of data, you may want to consider storing that data in Access and using Excel for the analysis.

Denis

 

[jsniderfamily]

Excel for topic of dissertation

To clarify: I can use Excel to make charts and things, but I want the topic itself to be about Excel. I thought of research pertaining to certifications, teaching methods, lack of productivity training in corporate america, and along those lines. I have the skill with Excel to create products and solutions as well, if needed for the research. The issue is finding a topic that has a wealth of prior scholarly material devoted to it that I can build on or refer to.

 

[SydneyGeek]

Aaahhh...

Now I see. maybe one idea is the corporate perception that Excel is a high risk for corporate reporting / BI analysis. On top of that, the corporate skilling (non-skilling) issue could have some useful stuff.

Check out exceluser.com for some background on Excel and BI; there are a number of papers out there on the "dangers" of excel-based models as well.

Maybe Bill Jelen's "The Spreadsheet at 25" could be a useful background too.

Denis

 

[Richard Schollar]

That's a good one Denis.

Check out the EUSPRIG stuff on this:

http://www.eusprig.org/

there are some good links and documents on the site.