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Pros and Cons of MacAnova
We like MacAnova because:
- It's free, we can give it to students to use at home or their labs
on Windows, Macintosh or Linux computers.
- It's reasonably small yet still does what we need it to do. We use
it extensively in course work, but also more broadly in applied statistics
and research computing.
- It's extensible via macros.
- It's reasonably fast.
- Students can get up and running for simple things with only a few
commands.
- It works well with libraries of named data sets and macros.
- It is flexible enough and powerful enough to use for research level
statistical computing
- The windowed versions provide easy importing and exporting of data
and results via special variable CLIPBOARD so users can
enter data in a spreadsheet and do the analysis in MacAnova.
The most frequent complaints about MacAnova:
- It's not (choose one of SAS, SPSS, SYSTAT, MINITAB, DATADESK, JMP, ... )
or some other widely used commercial program.
- Even the Windows and Macintosh versions are not really menu driven
and thus, to steal a phrase, MacAnova may be said to be user-polite,
though perhaps not user-friendly.
We're happy to report that beginning with version 5.03, we are fixing
complaint number 2.
Last modified
Wed Aug 17 13:16:25 CDT 2005
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