manova or regression or ?; how to in excel

Question

I need to conduct analysis on one factor - which is number of days per project. I have around 30000 of projects with the number of days for each.

The projects are grouped in: categories(there are 10 categories), scales(A/B/C), regions(EU or Asia), months (12-in 1 year) and also one 0-1 factor.

I need to run analysis on this whole database, to find out which factors are important for the number of days and how they are influencing it.

I think that linear regression is one of the way to do it but I don't know how to use it (I'm going to work in excel).

I'm not sure if MANOVA is the right method and also how to conduct the analysis using it.

Are the methods correct and is there some guide how to run them in excel? Are there any more useful methods to do it?

Answer 1

Since it is 1-factor I think it would be ANOVA rather than MANOVA. Excel's Analysis ToolPak has a nice ANOVA utility. Here is a nice tutorial on using it.

Over the years there has been repeated criticisms of the numerical stability of Excel's statistical computation. The worst of the problems seem to have been largely fixed by Excel 2010, but many statisticians still regard Excel with suspicion. With 30,000 data points split between so many categories, I really don't think Excel would be a good tool. It might be good for a preliminary analysis, but with data on that scale you should consider using R.