Advertisement
I don't know how many of you do stats on a regular basis, but this seemed as good a place to take a poll as any. I have to pick a program to use with my AP Stats class next year... uhhh.... now. I lean towards mintab since that's what I used in grad school. Anyone in here have opinions on using excel for stats? My main reason for considering excel is it may be more available to my students.
posted by:
|
SF Bay Area
|
Advertisement
Advertisement
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Fri, May 9, 2008 - 8:15 PMNeither... go with Mathematica and get the educational discount, which makes it affordable and it can do so much more then simple statistics. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Mon, May 12, 2008 - 9:04 PMI've used Mathematica before and like it, but can't sell my school on it - my choices are minitab, excel, or something that starts with an "F" that I've never used (or seen used) before.... -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Mon, May 12, 2008 - 9:32 PMDo you know about R? Its free. www.r-project.org/ Interface might be daunting, but it can do much more than Excel. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Thu, October 15, 2009 - 9:36 PM
R rocks. for newbies, step through Faraway's manuscript on Regression with R.
cran.r-project.org/doc/cont...y-PRA.pdf
you can download the 'faraway' library and step through the examples. it's a great way to learn R. if you're new to regression, it's good for that too.
if you have the funds, I recommend buying the book.
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 12:32 PMOh nice! Open source rocks.
-
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Mon, May 12, 2008 - 10:23 PMInstead of selling the school on Mathematica, seel Mathematica on the school. Depending on how many copies (licenses) you would need, you might be able to get Wolfram (the maker of Mathematica) to give it to the school for the first year. Once you have it, then it should be a lot easier to get the school to pay for the future licensing deal, especially because a computer lab with it could be used for calculus, physics, algebra, and statistics, maybe economics as well.
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 12:33 PMIf you end up going the Excel route you might want to check out Open Office, its open source and free but also compatable files with Excel Word and PowerPoint. I use it for College. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 5:32 PM
Excel is cool for spreadsheets. if you want to do any sort of statistical analysis, it is a joke. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 5:48 PMAnd last time I tried, the statistics plugin thing didn't exist. . . -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 9:03 PMsorry for the icoherent message: I meant to say that OpenOffice did not, last time I tried, have the statistical extension that Excel has. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 10:59 AMWhat about trying old fashion plug in your own formulas?
BTW Excel has a statistical extension? Did not know that. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 12:25 PM>> What about trying old fashion plug in your own formulas? <<
hey sure. you can write it in VB. and the next time a new distribution of Excel is released you can watch half of your functions generate mysterious errors. I've been through that crap once and it isn't going to happen a second time.
>> BTW Excel has a statistical extension? Did not know that. <<
yeah. read above.
that and the optimization feature is interactive. which means you can't batch your script. I don't have time for that nonsense. use R or Python. they're stable and they are both legitimate programming languages. ActiveState Python even has a nice hook into MS objects allowing you to generate Excel or Word documents on the fly if you need to. -
-
This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.
Re: minitab or excel?
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 5:42 PMIf you want to do statistics get SAS, SPSS or Mathematica. The first two are strictly statistics packages and Mathematica has all that built-in though it does take practice to use. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 6:47 PM>> If you want to do statistics get SAS, SPSS or Mathematica. <<
why blow the money when you can download R and Python for free? not to mention that SAS has to be the most cluged language I've ever worked with. it's like programming in COBOL. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 7:41 PMWhy? Because I've never used R or Python, and Mathematica can do so much more then statistics. I do agree that using SAS is like programming in Fortran.
-
-
-
This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.
Re: minitab or excel?
Mon, October 19, 2009 - 1:14 PM>"hey sure. you can write it in VB."<
Am I missing something here? Doesn't anyone use a straight spreadsheet anymore?
Rather punch in formulas than code a whole app or even a macro. -
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Mon, October 19, 2009 - 9:54 PM>> Am I missing something here? Doesn't anyone use a straight spreadsheet anymore? <<
yeah sure. and there are serious limitations. try to run a bootstrap or a permutation test with nothing but a spreadsheet. or do some Bayesian analysis. statistics is becoming way more computationally intensive.
but Excel is fine for the basic stuff.
-
-
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 12:32 PM
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Re: minitab or excel?
Thu, October 15, 2009 - 9:41 PM>> Neither... go with Mathematica and get the educational discount, which makes it affordable and it can do so much more then simple statistics. <<
or you could go with Octave or Asymptote for free.
-
