If you (you = anybody) wants to do themselves a big favor and has an afternoon to kill, read these two books (they are small, and easy to read):
http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/dp/0062731025/
and
http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728/
You will be a better scientists if you do.

And actually, the Cartoon Guide to Chemistry (and the one to Physics) are really good too.

I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s a bad program go use. Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll definitely look into those, since I have another semester of analytical lab to go.

I usually use GraphPad Prism (http://www.graphpad.com/prism/) for my data analysis. It is quite powerful but easy to use. But not everybody can or is willing to buy it; but I do so much data compiling and combing of data it is worth it to me. Quite often I spend ~8 hours straight compiling and analyzing data from a group of people.

Believe it or not, a really good free program was one create in 1993 for Window 3.1. NCSS Jr (http://www.ncss.com/download_ncss_junior.html) it’s graphs and plots and such are not as pretty and modern looking, but they get the job done.

There is also a nice website with a really good complete statistics and analysis package. StatCrunch (http://www.statcrunch.com/) now, it is like $5 for 6 months and $8 for 12. It is geared more towards Students.

And of-course when you want to jump up to the big boy (which post people never need) is R. http://www.r-project.org/

“Evaporation of the solvent by heating gave crude 10 … as a brown oil at a 70.34% yield. Flash chromatography … yielded 10 as a yellow oil in 2.85% yield…”

The TA’s comment makes it even better (worse?): “You lost 68%?!”

Fortunately, I did not fail that assignment.