Professional Statistical Software (R, SAS)

[poncije]

Hello,
Does any of you people use professional statistical software? I need it for my university, I study ecnomics and i love linux, but most of the programs are writen for windows :-/. I heard there is this R program but i never cuold find a GUI that works and I am preaty weak with the textual mode. Do you know if there is any way to implement the R engine into openoffice calc? Or is there a statistical upgrade for the calc? (For microsoft excel thre is a bunch of those...)

I saw that there is a SAS version for linux but i never got to the SAS licence so I could install it... mybe I should try that. :-)

[drhilbert]

Have a look at ROOT (http://root.cern.ch) or JAS3 (http://jas.freehep.org/jas3/). Both are open source programs for data analysis (and statistics of course) for High Energy Physics experiments.

The first one is C++ and it has been ported almost to all OS/platform, while the second one is JAVA based so only a java vm is required.

Enjoy!

cheers,

[RupertPupkin]

Originally Posted by poncije

I heard there is this R program but i never cuold find a GUI that works and I am preaty weak with the textual mode.

Have you ever tried the Rcmdr GUI? I use R extensively, and though I prefer the text mode I've never had any problems with Rcmdr. It uses the tcltk package, and is easy to install from the R command prompt:
install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies=TRUE)

Then you load it like this: library(Rcmdr)

Do you know if there is any way to implement the R engine into openoffice calc? Or is there a statistical upgrade for the calc?

No to both questions, as far as I know.

I saw that there is a SAS version for linux but i never got to the SAS licence so I could install it... mybe I should try that. :-)

Yep, there is SAS/JMP for Linux, but it is expensive. An alternative is to run a Windows statistical program in VMWare or Qemu. I've run Windows versions of Minitab and SPSS in Qemu with no problem. Don't bother trying to get those running under Wine, by the way, it won't work. Trust me, I (and many others) have tried.

[poncije]

Tanks guys. :-) this means a lot.