It's a very exciting time at Minitab's offices around the world, because we've just announced the availability of Minitab® 18 Statistical Software.

Data is everywhere today, but to use it to make sound, strategic business decisions, you need to have tools that turn that data into knowledge and insights. We've designed Minitab 18 to do exactly that. 

We've incorporated a lot of new features, made some great enhancements and put a lot of energy into developing a tool that will make getting insight from your data faster and easier than ever before, and we're excited to get feedback from you about the new release. 

The advanced capabilities we've added to Minitab 18 include tools for measurement systems analysis, statistical modeling, and Design of Experiments (DOE). With Minitab 18, it’s much easier to test how a large number of factors influence process output, and to get more accurate results from models with both fixed and random factors.

We'll delve into more detail about these features in the coming weeks, but today I wanted to give you a quick overview of some of the most exciting additions and improvements. You can also check out one of our upcoming webinars to see the new features demonstrated. Then I hope you'll check them out for yourself—you can get Minitab 18 free for 30 days.

Updated Session Window

The first thing longtime Minitab users are likely to notice when they launch Minitab 18 is the enhancements we've made to the Session window, which contains the output of all your analyses. 

• Specify the number of significant digits (decimal places) in your output
• Go directly to graphs by clicking links in the output
• Expand and collapse analyses for easier navigation
• Zoom in and out 

Sort Worksheets in the Project Manager

We've also added the option to sort the worksheets in your project by title or in chronological order, so you can manage and work with your data in the Project Manager more easily.

Definitive Screening Designs

Many businesses need to determine which inputs make the biggest impact on the output of a process. When you have a lot of inputs, as most processes do, this can be a huge challenge. Standard experimental methods can be costly and time-consuming, and may not be able to distinguish main effects from the two-way interactions that occur between inputs.

That challenge is answered in Minitab 18 with Definitive Screening Designs, a type of designed experiment that minimizes the number of experimental runs required, but still lets you identify important inputs without confounding main effects and two-way interactions.

Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML) Estimation

Another feature we've added to Minitab 18 is restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimation. This is an advanced statistical method that improves inferences and predictions while minimizing bias for mixed models, which include both fixed and random factors.

New Distributions for Tolerance Intervals

With Minitab 18 we've made it easy to calculate statistical tolerance intervals for nonnormal data with a distributions including the Weibull, lognormal, exponential, and more.

Effects Plots for Designed Experiments (DOE)

In another enhancement to our Design of Experiments (DOE) functionality, we've added effects plots for general factorial and response surface designs, so you can visually identify significant X’s.

Historical Standard Deviation in Gage R&R

If you're doing the measurement system analysis method known as Gage R&R, Minitab 18 enables you to enter a user-specified process (historical) standard deviation in relevant calculations.

Response Optimizer for GLM

When you use the response optimizer for the general linear model (GLM), you can include both your factors and covariates to find optimal process settings.

Output in Table Format to Word and Excel

The Session window output can be imported into Word and Excel in table format, which lets you easily customize the appearance of your results.

Command Line Pane

Many people use Minitab's command line to expand the software's functionality. With Minitab 18, we've made it easy to keep commands separate from the Session output with a docked command line pane. 

Updated Version of Quality Trainer

Finally, it's worth mentioning that the release of Minitab 18 is complemented by new version of Quality Trainer by Minitab®, our e-learning course. It teaches you how to solve real-world quality improvement challenges with statistics and Minitab, and lets you refresh that knowledge anytime. If you haven't tried it yet, you can check out a sample chapter now. 

We hope you'll try the latest Minitab release!  And when you do, please be sure to let us know what you think: we love to get your feedback and input about what we've done right, and what we can make better! Send your comments to [email protected].