Statistical software?
 

Anybody know anything about statistics software?

My boss is looking to put together a little survey and I've been pegged to help, even though I know next to nothing about such things.

Free is a must (she's cheap) and the easier to use the better (she's not a 'techie'). She mentioned--and this is off the top of my head--that it should be able to determine means and standard deviations. Not being a student of Economics, Statistics and such, I have no idea what she means.

We're having a meeting this afternoon about it, so more details to follow, eh?

All help appreciated

gothmund,

If you have access to Microsoft Excel or an equivalent spreadsheet, that will give you basic easy-to-use means, standard deviations, etc. If you don't have access to the microsoft Office Suite, then check out something like

Open Office. I know there are other Microsoft Office emulators out there, and they will usually have a spreadsheet app.

within tExcel you can calculate means using the AVERAGE function, and standard deviations using the STDEV function.

Good luck.

Meeting was this afternoon.

Believe me Excel was suggested...quite a few times.

The boss says she wants something else. Something 'professional' (exact quote, I swear...)

I have another don't-invite-the-boss-meeting meeting tomorrow morning. :D

If Microsoft Excel isn't "professional" enough, then I'd second pigglet's reccomendation of OpenOffice. In OpenOffice Calc, you can use the functions STDEV for standard deviation and AVERAGE for means (in the format ="command"("datarange") ie: =STDEV(B2 : D2)

Edit: Please ignore any spaces in the second example I gave, the forum thinks I'm making a smile without them, and I can't figure out any other way to prevent it.

I wouldn't think many statistical analysis programs would normally be free for the taking (as I would think that it'd be quite a specialized area), but you might luck out on trying to use a trial version of either SPSS or MiniTab (which both sound like overkill for your boss's needs).

Good luck

I use SAS and SPSS for my research activities. Both of those programs are probably overkill for your needs.

SPSS is easy to use and has a pretty intuitive point and click interface. SAS relies on code and has a much steeper learning curve.

gothmund,

It might be helpful if you could tell us a little bit about the data you need to analyze, and the type of analysis you need to carry out. If you're boss has some data sets and wants the average, mean, st dev, etc - not using something like excel seems pretty stupid to me. its widely available and easy to use. you could always make up a name for some mythical statistical package, then use excel, and just give him/her the analyzed data :)

To be perfectly honest, I don't think she knows what the hell she wants to do with it. She's got a notion in her head and no one (no matter how sensible the nudge is) is going to knock her off it.

SPSS was suggested as we have it available in the library already (for some nursing related program, I think...), but everyone at the pow-wow this morning agreed that it's overkill. We'd love to just do it in Excel and through the art of misdirection convince her we didn't, but, unfortunately she's very "hands on."

I think, by means of non-verbal consensus, we're just going to keep pushing the Excel idea until she either gives in or gives up, but I certainly appreciate the help. :)

Tell your boss from me (an MSc holding research scientist) that if I could use Excell to analyse thermodynamic data accurate to parts per billion across many tens of thousands of data points, then she can use it for whatever tiny project she has in mind.

The averages calculated by the "AVERAGE" function are as accurate as they would be if you did them lnghand, and so are the standard deviations.

The big secret here is that the numbers don't know what software generated them - they're just the numbers.

SPSS will do what you want, and is quite easy to use. So if it'll make her happy to use a real stats program instead of excel, there's no reason not to. It'll probablly take you twice as long to do simple things in SPSS than in Excel, but that's probablly still less time than it would take you to convince your boss she's wrong :).

The advantage to SPSS is that if you want to do some more complicated analysis later on, you'll already have the files loaded in and ready to go. It doesn't take long to get into areas where SPSS is better than Excel, or into things that Excel just can't do.