Prism is designed specifically for research scientists and makes it easy to perform the analyses scientists need, including t-tests, one- and two-way ANOVA, parametric and non-parametric tests, curve fitting, survival analyses and more. Likewise, Excel does not have the flexibility to create the presentation-quality graphs most scientists require. While it is possible to coax Excel to fit curves, it isn't easy and the results are not complete (no standard errors or confidence intervals of the parameters). Excel does not make quality scientific graphs, and can perform only a few statistical analyses. Microsoft Excel is a general business application that is very good at storing and manipulating large amounts of data.
