Data Analysis: Automating Distribution Comparisons from Daily Stats

[bloynoys]

Hey guys, I have a question of how to go about answering a question. I am trying to decide what coding/database language to learn next (most likely SQL with some access thrown in), but have an overall question.

I am looking for an application or way to crunch daily statistical updates, then calculate distributions from that, then go back and compare numbers to distribution. So ideally, there are 1000 people, they do things on a daily basis in many different variables, these get tabulated and updated daily, I would like a program or write one that takes these creates a distribution for each column variable from data and then goes back and compares each individual statistic to overall distribution and color coats it (or another defining way of showing that) depending on where they are in the distribution. Like white is people in the top 5% of that variable, yellow shows the next 15% etc etc. Is there a way to do this easier than epically long formulas in excel and more automated to read in daily stat updates?

Thanks!

 

[mfb]

All common statistics tools should be able to do that.
If you have data as list (name,value), marking the top 5%/20%/... is easy with excel as well, and you don't need those tools. You could probably import data with a macro.