[R] question from a beginner

P.J.Wells@open.ac.uk P.J.Wells at open.ac.uk
Mon Feb 4 16:07:53 CET 2002


Ben Bolker wrote, in reply to Yiling Chen's inquiry about whether there were
GUI-driven stat.s programs:

>  No, not really.

No doubt it all depends on exactly what one has in mind, but I should have
said that there *many* programs that offered access to statistical
procedures via "point and click" methods, from Excel upwards through SPSS
and on to S-Plus.

Which you recommend should depend on the needs of the audience.

Even Excel, in spite of its well-documented defects, has a place; as a way
of luring generalist students into getting to grips with the nuts and bolts
of statistics it is unrivalled, since knowledge of Excel is clearly a
marketable skill in its own right.

For a slightly different student audience I think DataDesk is very
attractive.

And for fine control over the appearance of charts S-Plus's GUI mode is
superb. I should be very interested to hear, for example, of ways in which
R, or S-Plus in command-line mode, can be made to control chart grids in the
way that the S-Plus GUI can.

Julian Wells
OU Business School
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
+44 1908 654658

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