Software
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The list provided here gives just a few of the software packages available
for statistical processing. The software is what enables the various computers
to interact with us, the users, and to carry out the commands that we formulate,
in accordance with the design of the particular software, to perform
data acquisition, transformation, analysis, and presentation.
Minitab is a popular program for statistical processing.
Minitab has been available on the PC for decades and its power and
functionality have continued to grow. It is quite popular
in educational settings. There is a version, Minitab Express, which
is available on both the PC and the Mac. At the
time this was written, both versions were available for a free 30 day trail,
but after that each user must purchase a license. The licenses
will cost about $30 for 6 months, or $50 for 12 months.
SPSS, statistical package for the social sciences, has
been a mainstay of statistical processing. It has been available on many
different computer systems from mainframes to personal computers.
The cost of a license for the software is significant, although there are
some Student versions that one can get for $36 and up (depending on the required sophistication)
for a 6 month lease.
For the record,
WCC has been using SPSS for administrative statistical processing for over 20 years.
SAS is another major commercial player in the industry.
SAS has been available and has been used extensively for decades.
As was the case with Minitab, besides its namesake product,
SAS has a smaller though powerful companion product,
JMP, which runs on both PC's and Mac's.
Excel was developed as a spreadsheet program. As it grew
the designers added certain statistical functions to Excel.
It is possible to do a great deal of statistical work within
this program. Of course, Excel runs on both PC's and Mac's.
Although it is not at all free, there is no extra cost to
obtaining and using its basic statistical features.
Midas is included in this list because it was so popular around
here for so many years. Midas was developed at the University of Michigan
and it ran on the UM's academic mainframe computer. The commands
for the system were fairly easy to learn. It was used throughout
the academic community for teaching and for research. Sadly, it is
with us no longer.
S is a computer language designed to help the user perform statistical
computations. S was originally developed at Bell Laboratories
starting around 1976 by John Chambers and others. The language developed
and spread. It is survived by the S-PLUS language, a software
package, which was commercially available,
designed specifically for statistical analysis and presentation.
R started as a free alternative to S. It was designed to
do just what S did. From that start, R has developed into a
full featured, powerful language for data manipulation, analysis,
and presentation. R remains free and is available on PC's, Mac's,
and Unix machines. R is an open source system. As such it continues
to be developed and augmented by thousands of people around the world.
It has become quite popular, both for its cost ($0) and for
its extensive and powerful libraries. As a measure of that popularity
you might notice that many of the packages listed in the
Wikipedia page on
statistical packages
have implemented links or access to R commands.
One of the appealing features of R is that it is possible
to use the language to not only analyze data but to record and
document every step in the process of taking data from its raw
form through to the end of analysis and presentation.
This is most helpful in the scientific environment where
research methodology is essential to understanding and verifying
research results.
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©Roger M. Palay
Saline, MI 48176 September, 2015