Simple statistics for the Mac Masses
Despite being a enrolled post-graduate student at an accredite university, it seems I have trouble accessing a statistics program. We have a number of licenses to SPSS, but it is installed on other people’s computers, which are fine if they can log me in, and leave their desk for an hour or so.
Buying the license to a stats program just isn’t worth it - these things run to hundreds of dollars. There are three viable solutions for Mac
High tech nerdy bots
R is an open source stats program. However, it has a maths inteface, and is not a simple solution for the casual user. I include it here because it is apparently excellent, if you can be bothered figuring out how to use it.
Online statistics solutions
Statcrunch is an online tool, which offers a cheap subscirption service. you can import your results by importing a spreadsheet, or by pasting data into the java form. Most basic stats analysis tools are available, but they are a little kludgy. Results can be saved into your statcrunch account, for later reference. They can also be exported as an image, or even copied to your clipboard.
And the winner is… Plainstat
By far the best solution I have found is a fabulous free application, Plainstat. This is a very simple program, but it caters to most “check-up” stats I need on a regular basis.
It includes :
- Descriptive stats,
- correlation (parametric and non-parametric),
- Chi-square, and
- comparison of means (parametric and non-parametric).
- (feature list)
There are few user interface issues, like you have to manually insert rows before you can paste in data to avoid truncation. However, all outputs are saved with the data for easy reference. Cut and paste to another program is difficult, unless you export the results to a text file first. Despite these limitations, this program is one I have come to rely on.
If you do any basic data work, and know your way around a t test (there are no extensive help files in this one) I encourage you to check out Plainstat.
Do you have any other options for stats on the Mac? Please share your solutions in the comments. And I would love anyone who uses R to write a guest post explaining it to the rest of us…
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