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HP Prime - Statistics
08-22-2014, 10:12 PM (This post was last modified: 08-22-2014 10:13 PM by paul.hermans@benemtech.com.)
Post: #7
RE: HP Prime - Statistics
Thanks Tim,
That does help, and your criticisms of my post are fair too....guess that is what happens with frustration.

It is not fair to say that the help document sucks, it is quite comprehensive in terms of describing the various functions. I think my frustration came from it being hard to find anything quickly. This really isn't because the manual is not good, but that the calculator does so much that it is quite long. For this example, since I didn't know the actual name of the function in the HP calculator, I searched for "Normal" which of course came up quite often. Where I got bogged down is the Inference App which does something with confidence intervals (which I haven't learned about yet so it is like a foreign language) but the word Normal appears a lot. Anyways, I did find it and it worked as documented.

I commented on the on calculator help in error as well. Silly as it seems now, I missed that when I hit help and then TREE, there was a search option.....i was scrolling through lots of commands. Dumb on my part.

One area where I think a bit of improvement could happen is the "explaining" how the different pieces of the calculator work together. I have a couple of examples:

1) If I have input an equation, say something like x^3-4x^2-5x+4 =0 and i want to evaluate that for x=5 and x=-2, how do I do that? I am 100% sure there is a way, but it is elusive so far. I would hope that it was easy to find in the manual but not yet.

2) I was using the CAS to do some basic stuff like factoring a polynomial....which worked great I might add, and then I decided I wanted to plot the function. Now I have trouble again. I selected the equation from the command line, and then selected the soft key for Copy.....pressed APP, selected Advanced Grapher and attempted to paste the equation in.....there is no soft key for Paste...so tried SHFT-MENU and it shows a list to paste from, but not the thing i just copied. Now i realize that the soft key for COPY only copied from the stack to the active input line....so i go back and use SHFT-VIEW to copy it, then back to the Adv Grapher and paste it in for V1. Click Enter - SYNTAX ERROR. So I try entering a Y= in front of what I pasted.....SYNTAX ERROR.....so I manually enter the equation from scratch....No problem...works like a champ. Turns out that for some reason an X in the CAS is not the same as an X in the advanced grapher....no idea why, no explanation about how this is supposed to work (at least not that I've found yet)

When I lashed out at the manual, problem 2 in particular was a source of that feeling. Why would y=x^2 from the CAS be any different than y=X^2 from the soft keys in the app? If there is a logical reason (there usually is) then that is what I would want to understand from a manual....how the calc works....how i move between various different things like CAS and an APP and if there are any limitations to doing so that i need to be aware of.

Does that make sense? A lot of the frustration is because I haven't used a calculator in a long time, the last one I used was an HP 28C and it was the new best thing ever back then.....and things have changed a little.

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can give on this type of thing.
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Messages In This Thread
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - walter b - 08-22-2014, 05:42 AM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - walter b - 08-22-2014, 05:52 AM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - David Hayden - 08-22-2014, 08:26 PM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - Tim Wessman - 08-22-2014, 03:39 PM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - paul.hermans@benemtech.com - 08-22-2014 10:12 PM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - Bill Zimmerly - 08-23-2014, 05:27 AM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - aurelio - 08-23-2014, 02:48 PM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - Angus - 08-23-2014, 09:39 AM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - CR Haeger - 08-23-2014, 10:34 AM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - parisse - 08-23-2014, 12:04 PM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - parisse - 08-23-2014, 02:45 PM
RE: HP Prime - Statistics - StephanP - 04-27-2015, 02:37 PM



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