Microsoft Excel, SPSS And The Legal and Ethical Aspects of Surveys And Data Collection

Microsoft excel is a software developed and manufactured by Microsoft Corporation. It permits consumers to organize, format and calculate data with formulas using a spread sheet system busted up by rows and columns. It comes packaged up with Microsoft office and is attuned with other applications. The first software alike to Excel was developed in 1982 and was called Multiplan.

Describe ways in which MS Excel can be used by a manager of an organization as a tool for interpreting data.

Microsoft excel allows the manager of an organization to store and manipulate data for various purposes. The device within Excel provides you the aptitude to interpret data sets, akin to the types of interpretation expected when using database (DiMaggio, 2013).  These interpretations present insights into organizations performance, updates management decision and helps in the future planning of an organization.  Microsoft Excel has features that facilitate various activities, like, collating, processing, visualizing data and filtering.

What are the major benefits to using the statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) software?

Statistical package for social sciences program was developed in 1968 and since then, it has been the widely used statistical package in social sciences. SPSS has a host of fitted-in statistical functions and spread sheet format for simple data entry, in addition, SPPS has faster and easier basic functions similar to descriptive statistics which are standard deviation, mean and median which aids in accurate data entry. The pull-down menus in SPPS has a wide range of graphs and charts that are paramount in creating complex graphs like the contingency tables (Huang,  Sherman, & Lempicki,  2008).  Finally, the pull-down menus provides easy access to wide range of statistical test compared to Microsoft Excel.

What potential legal or ethical issues could arise if the information gained in a survey was used to create an ideal profile of characteristics that the company looked for when hiring employees?

The ethical issues alone would be astounding,   it is hard to create an ideal profile of people who will be potential employees, as people are unique and have different skills and talents (Ferrell, & Fredric, 2014).   Diversities of skills and talents form a workplace, where everyone in their unique way is able to help each other.   Legally, it is discriminating to create an outline of an ideal worker using certain individualities from a survey. Answers from a survey always outline the best of a person, this limits the productivity of a company, since, and there are no diverse skills and talents. It also undermines employee’s confidence as they cannot match with the ideal profile

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