Command Overview

The Benford analysis command is used to compute measure of compliance with Benford's law for "by variables" within the population. The command supports four sources of data for testing:

1. Data file in tab separated value format
2. WorkSheet
3. Selected range within a worksheet
4. Database (e.g. MS-Access, MySQL, etc)

Syntax

The command is entered on the command line as the command name ("banalysis", or just "ba") followed by one or more command parameters. Each command parameter consists of an argument name, immediately followed by an equal sign ("=") and then immediately followed by a value. The value may be enclosed with quotation marks, and must be enclosed by quotation marks if the value consists of any embedded spaces.

An example of a command parameter to specify that the file name to be processed is test.txt is entered as "file=test.txt" (without the quotations). Each argument on the command line must consist of only valid parameter names. If a required parameter name is missing, then the command line will be colored yellow, an error message will be displayed on the Excel status bar and an audible tone will be sounded.

The following is a listing of all parameter values for the Benford analysis command, separated between the types of data sources (ds). Parameters common to all data sources are described in the section "Common Parameters".

An example

The command to obtain Benford analysis statistics from the file named \ms\data\dupinv.txt using the vendor number column named "Vendno" and the invoice amount column named "Paid Amount", storing the results on the worksheet named "Benford" is as follows:

ba ds=file file=\ms\data\dupinv.txt col="Vendno" amount=Amount recap="Benford"

Note the input data source does not need to be sorted.

Output from the processing will include measures of Benford compliance by vendor number, including counts, Chi Square and the d-statistic (Kolmogorov-Smirnov).

An example of the command bar is shown below:

This produces the following report:

Main Form