Beyond Excel...

Up to now you may only have used Microsoft Excel (spreadsheet) for data analysis
This is a general purpose program which is not particularly well suited to scientific data analysis

More specialized programs are *way* more powerful
These include Matlab, IDL and Mathmatica

I will illustrate these classes using Matlab - other programs offer equivalent functionality
Matlab appears to be available for download by UMN CSE students at: https://wwws.cs.umn.edu/matlab/student/
Available for Windows/Mac/Linux