Off topic - Free Statistics Software

Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 7, 2007 at 12:28 PM

quant wrote:
>I’m not much into statistics, but what I hear from colleagues who do, then R is the way to
>do (also a free sofware), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_programming_language

R is pretty scary for anyone who isn’t a statistician and a programmer. Its command line driven and you need to build up your analysis in stages. So while it is arguably the “best” statistics program available today. ( with some arguments for preferring SAS, Stata or Genstat) it is a very different market from the “easy to use” Excel addin one.

Having said that there are some GUI add-ins for R, but even with these, you quickly need to revert to the command line interface.

Having said that, I would have been interested in trying this out, but time difference means that, as always, I have missed the offer.

Graham