Getting ready

We will be using data from Oxford weather station; it can be obtained from http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/. Select Oxford weather station data and copy the data into Minitab. Only copy the data and not the column headers. Then, rename the columns as Year, Month, T Max, T Min, Airfrost(days), Rain(mm), and Sun(Hrs).

How to do it…

The following instructions will create a new column for the hours of sunlight to amount of rainfall in a month ratio:

How it works…

The results of this function are generated in the selected column. The checkbox Assign as a formula will create a formula in the worksheet that will keep updating it. By default, this is not selected to avoid problems with circular or self-referencing formulas. When a formula is stored in a column, a green cross is placed at the top of the column to indicate the presence of a formula. The green cross indicates that this is up-to-date, while a red cross would indicate a problem in updating the formula.

There's more…

The calculator in Minitab has a plethora of functions available. We can choose from the function list on the right in the calculator screen. These include several statistical, mathematical, and text functions. They can be filtered with the drop-down list at the top. The help function for the calculator includes a list of functions and how to use them.

See also