Paul Pope on EZAnalyze

My name is Paul Pope. As an evaluation specialist for Texas AgriLife Extension Service, one of my major responsibilities is to train our “faculty in the field” in the basics of program evaluation. County extension educators (agents) are expected to plan and conduct program evaluations in order to demonstrate the impact of their educational efforts. One part of that process involves tabulation and analysis of evaluation data from surveys. For the educator who is already familiar with Microsoft Excel, I have found EZAnalyze to be an ideal analysis tool.

Rad Resource: EZAnalyze is an Excel-based analysis tool for educators. As an add-in, once installed, it simply shows up as an additional menu option within Excel. Having an easy-to-use tabulation tool allows our training to be much more focused on analysis strategies and steps to uncover program impacts rather than learning the mechanics of the tool itself.

Product Features:

• Assumes the first row contains variable names; then data starts in second row.
• All operations are incorporated into pull-down menus.
• No cell ranges to define.  No formulas to create. No functions to learn.
• Ability to create variables and run results by groups.
• Descriptive statistics, correlation, t-tests, chi-square, and ANOVA.
• Frequency tables include percent and valid percent columns.

For the County Extension Educator:

• Very easy to learn and use. All point-and-click.
• Intuitive (even for educators with limited experience working with data)
• Free of charge for educators.
• Data entry and analysis can be done within one software package (Excel).
• Sufficient for basic analysis needs
• Can take advantage of Excel’s features and tools to enhance results.
• Avoids cost and learning curve associated with powerful statistical packages.

EZAnalyze is available online at http://www.ezanalyze.com

Note: There is a data analysis add-in that comes with Excel; however, it requires the user to define cell ranges and lacks some important features – most notably, frequency tables as a point-and-click option.

This contribution is from the aea365 Daily Tips blog, by and for evaluators, from the American Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org.