Quick question for everyone out there that has experience with the various statistical software packages available such as Minitab, SPSS, etc. I am currently taking a Stats course in my MBA work and will need a good stats software package for this course and future courses. Are there any suggestions for software packages that are not overly expensive and are pretty easy to learn to use?
I used SPSS in graduate school, albeit quite a few years ago. It took some getting used to, but I found it very useful once you got the hang of it. Insert disclaimer that the version I used is probably 35 versions out-of-date.
Minitab is probably a little easier to use than SPSS. But the lowest cost is probably using the built in functions in Excel. Although Minitab and SPSS both do much more than Excel can in raw data analysis. One thing is to compare on price, SPSS at a academic rates is $90, while you can get Minitb for as low as $30 (14 month license).
For your MBA classes, the stats functions in Excel should be enough. There are some good books out there that cover Excel for business analysis. For later on I would recommend NCSS. It's much easier to use than SPSS or SAS, and the student version is only around $50. You can download a fully functional 30 day trial version at http://www.ncss.com/.
CoStat is pretty good software that has the added advantage of being cross-platform, it runs on Windows 95 and later, plus Mac OS X, OS/2 and Linux. http://www.cohort.com/costat.html Only annoyance is on some platforms you have to convert your excel spreadsheets to text files before you can import them into CoStat, but it's pretty powerful software for only $70.00 for students.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I've been using Data Analysis Plus for Excel (it came with the book) and so far, it does everything I need. I've also tried a demo version of a few other packages, but for now, excel gets the job done. Thanks for the advice!
