A: Most statistical software produces point estimates, standard errors, t statistics, degrees of freedom, and p values. Instead of p values, however, most published research uses asterisks to indicate the significance level of the results. Punching in the asterisks is time consuming and prone to error.

Given output from a statistical package, the attached spreadsheet fills in the asterisks automatically. The spreadsheet calculates confidence intervals, which are important though not often used in sociology. The user can specify the desired confidence level.

Using the Excel menus, you can hide columns and add lines, round results to 2 digits, etc. Paste the results into a word processor, edit a little more, and you're ready to submit!

Of course, before you can use the spreadsheet, you have to get your results into it.

The example spreadsheet, by the way, reports seemingly unrelated regression results from a study of variables influencing midterm and final exam scores in Sociology 549. The final version of the table is on page 13.