Site News
- JMP 8 (from SAS) is here and it’s fast! Other updates on our general stats software page
- StatPlus 5.3.5 review
- PASW 17 (née SPSS 17)
Quick blog, June 2009: JMP vs PASW/SPSS
I’m testing SAS-JMP 8, and I am very impressed. The writers have kept the Mac-friendliness alive, with a set of Mac-only preferences, blindingly fast performance, instant response times, and no hint that this program is published by a company that only makes a single Mac-compatible product. It is, to say the least, amazing. Comparisons to the clunky-interfaced PASW (what we used to call SPSS) cannot be favorable... at least in sheer speed. Try to open a spreadsheet with four variables and 30,000 entries, and while PASW is busily digesting the idea, JMP has already opened it and displayed descriptive statistics... in an easily copied spreadsheet. Run the same descriptives in PASW, and you get a table with a bunch of dots — because the columns are the wrong size! This is a stunner.
Numeric output of JMP in our tests (which used 30,000 randomly generated 15-digit numbers) was identical in PASW, Stata, JMP, and the free Megastat. In this group, JMP was by far the fastest (finished before we could look at the stopwatch), followed closely by PASW and Stata (around 1 second each), and then by Megastat, which at 3 seconds was still quite reasonable.
Regressions in JMP were absurdly fast — instantaneous, in fact. That includes multiple multiple, high-resolution plots we could copy directly into Photoshop, summary of fit, analysis of variance, parameter estimates, residual plots, actual by predicted, etc. Again, we’re using 30,000 cases. What’s more, from the output window, we could not just copy and paste tables or plots, but could even change parameters or run additional tests from convenient submenus within the output.
All of the packages have their friends and advantages. Stata, which is beloved by professional statisticians and mathematicians for its incredible flexibility and range (due largely to a massive library of contributed routines), is the hardest of the bunch to use. PASW also now can run R routines, but is, by far, the most expensive of the four when you include their plugins and upgrade fees. MegaStat is free and easy to use; it’s also the only of these four that has no syntax language at all (PASW has both syntax and macros).
That said, it’s hard to beat JMP’s stunning and flexible graphics, its solid package of statistics, its helpful help which goes into both statistical issues and program issues, and its sheer responsiveness — not to mention the ease of taking its output and putting it into other software. For graphics, you can even have it use Photoshop file format (PSD) when copying.
We’ll be posting more details, and some screen shots, soon.
About MacStats - the Macintosh statistical software clearinghouse
This is a clearinghouse for information about Mac software for statistical analysis. Please see the address at the bottom of the page for updates or corrections.
Specific software reviews
- GraphPad Prism statistics and visualization
- StatPlus:Mac 5
- Stata 8 for Mac (Stata 9 is similar though more capable)
- SPSS 17 and SPSS 16 for Mac
- Coming to the reviews section: InStat, JMP 8, and, after it’s released, SPSS 18
Software listings and reviews
- Regression/ANOVA and general statistics software packages
- Graphing and data visualization packages
- Data extraction software (to get data from scanned graphs and images)
- Structural equation modeling software packages
- Time series analysis software packages
- Programs for other uses; (including surveys, specialty stats, on-trick ponys, and such)
- General-purpose mathematical software that can be used for statistical and scientific analysis
- The dead zone of apparently-abandoned Mac statistical software
- Mac on Intel summary page
- What configuration do you have or need (e.g., Altivec? PowerPC? FPU-equipped? Intel?)
Key links and resources
- macintouch - daily reasoned discussions of Macintosh issues with filtered reader discussions
- macinchem - Macs in chemistry
- macresearch.org - Macs in research
- organizational change information
- Carl Witthoft pointed us to the only known gallery of statistics jokes.
Origins of MacStats
Joel West worked on this site from 1996 through 2005, then passed over stewardship to David Zatz. Apropos of nothing, here’s the Dodge Challenger R/T!