Question

An investment banking firm was considering two spreadsheet software for possible use in its large data analysis operations. A sample of 25 typical analysis problems were carried out using both software on the firm’s standard personal computer. The time in minutes needed to load the data, program the spreadsheet calculations, carry out the analysis, and print the results was recorded for each problem for each software. The data for software A are stored in column 1 of the Excel data file named “Banking Spreadsheet.” The corresponding data for software B are stored in column 2. Each of the rows corresponds to one of the 25 problems. After constructing the 98% and 94% confidence intervals for the mean of the differences in the minutes taken by the two software, a data analyst for the company concluded that there is no substantive difference between the two software in terms of the speed with which they process the data. In other words, he thought the mean of the differences in the minutes taken by the two software is statistically negligible. As a result he decided to recommend software B because he thought it is more user-friendly than software A. Using the same data, please calculate and interpret the confidence intervals upon which the analyst’s recommendation was based. Based on your results would you agree with the analyst’s conclusion? Please justify your answer.                                                                              [4 points]

Spreadsheet A	Spreadsheet B
10	10
23	23
24	24
19	17
21	12
26	22
14	13
19	16
12	18
35	28
34	25
23	28
28	27
24	20
38	33
20	20
31	27
29	24
35	28
24	25
35	28
17	25
24	18
22	21
30	34

Answer 1