Set up your worksheet so that a row of data contains information about a single item or subject. You must have one or more numeric columns containing measurement data, or predictors, and a single grouping column containing up to 20 groups. The column of group codes may be numeric, text, or date/time. If you wish to change the order in which text groups are processed from their default alphabetized order, you can define your own order. (See Ordering Text Categories). Minitab automatically omits observations with missing measurements or group codes from the calculations.
If a high degree of multicollinearity exists (i.e., if one or more predictors is highly correlated with another) or one or more of the predictors is essential constant, discriminant analysis calculations cannot be done and Minitab displays a message to that effect.