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question from a beginner

2 messages · P.J.Wells@open.ac.uk, Ben Bolker

P.J.Wells@open.ac.uk
# 
Ben Bolker wrote, in reply to Yiling Chen's inquiry about whether there were
GUI-driven stat.s programs:
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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Ben Bolker
#
On Mon, 4 Feb 2002 P.J.Wells at open.ac.uk wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
I wasn't saying whether GUI-driven stats programs existed, or whether
they were useful or not!  I was saying that there is not a GUI *for R*.
  I was also not claiming that GUIs are not useful, just suggesting why
they might be a lower priority for R developers.  I think most R
developers would agree that GUIs are potentially valuable but also a real
challenge to do right.

  Ben Bolker