Help students see the relevance of statistics in their own careers by using examples from functional areas (e.g., accounting, finance, marketing, etc.) that they may specialise in. Emphasise interpretation and analysis of statistical results over calculation, as these activities are more important to students’ futures. Give students ample practice in understanding how to apply statistics to business (e.g., classroom examples and homework exercises involve actual or realistic data, and both small and large data sets). Familiarise students with the use of data analysis software. Microsoft Excel, JMP, and Minitab are integrated into all topics to illustrate how software can help in the business decision-making process. Provide clear data analysis software instructions to students so they understand how to use the programs. New and Revised - Using Statistics business scenarios open each chapter, providing context for the concepts and showing how statistics is used in key functional areas of business. At the end of the chapter, Using Statistics, Revisited, reinforces the statistical methods and applications just discussed. In the 8th Edition, 7 chapters have new or revised Using Statistics scenarios. A running end-of-chapter Case throughout the text helps integrate learning across chapters and topics. With Digital Cases, students examine interactive documents to sift through various claims and information to discover the conclusions and claims supported by the data. Learners also see how to identify common misuses of statistical information. Pedagogical tools help keep students on track, providing an ideal framework for learning and understanding statistical concepts. New and Updated - Statistical software (JMP, Excel, and Minitab) instructions, guides, and output throughout every chapter familiarise students with how to use these programs in business decision making, and allow learners to focus on interpreting data rather than mathematical computations. Examples were personally written by the authors, who collectively have over 100 years of experience teaching the application of software to business. Visual explorations. The Excel add-in workbook allows students to interactively explore important statistical concepts in descriptive statistics, the normal distribution, sampling distributions, and regression analysis. Updated - Tabular summaries now guide readers to reach conclusions and make decisions based on statistical information (Chapters 9 through 15). They help clarify the purpose of the statistical method and better illustrate the role of stats in the business decision-making process. New - A brand-new Business Analytics Chapter 17 makes extensive use of JMP and Minitab to illustrate predictive analytics for prediction, classification, clustering, and association as well as explaining what text analytics does and how descriptive and prescriptive analytics relate to predictive analytics. The DCOVA framework (Define, Collect, Organise, Visualise, and Analyse) is used throughout this text as an integrated approach for applying statistics to help solve business problems. Additional learning opportunities. Student Tips, LearnMore bubbles, and Consider This features extend student-paced learning by reinforcing important points or examining side issues, or answering questions that arise while studying business statistics such as “What is so ‘normal’ about the normal distribution?” An Appendix provides additional self-study opportunities via answers to the Self-Test problems and most of the even-numbered problems in the text.