In this article, a very simple and yet useful feature of Excel called the SPIN BUTTON is used to illustrate two concepts associated with attribute acceptance sampling plans. The first concept is calculating the probability of lot acceptance based on which the operating characteristic (OC) curve of an attribute sampling plan is drawn. The SPIN BUTTON can show, visually, that the exact probability of lot acceptance calculated using the Hypergeometric distribution can be approximated by the Binomial distribution. The second concept is how the probability of lot acceptance changes when either one of the three parameters N, n, c of a sampling plan changes. The SPIN BUTTON can also visually show us how the shape of the OC curve of a sampling plan changes when the parameters vary.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education