Hello,
Thank you to everyone who passed on their views regarding the statistical
package Stata (or STATA as many people refer to it, although I was corrected
twice on the incorrect use of capitalisation!).
A number of people expressed an interest in a summary of the responses I
received and so here it is;
A high level summary is that Stata is a good package, it's easy to learn,
has common sense command language, is powerful enough to do the type of
statistical analysis that most of us do, has excellent help and support
features and is fast at processing. The main downside people mentioned is
that the graphics are slow and can be difficult to use and the output is
very basic.
If you require a more in-depth summary then I have copied a number of the
actual comments made below. Please note that these are not my opinion,
simply other AllStat member's honest views.
Once again, thank you very much to all of you who took the time to reply,
Best regards,
Carole.
Comments - in no particular order;
"...it does still retain the feel of a command line DOS programme..."
"Documentation very good"
"Stata is good and quick to learn for simple analysis"
"SAS would still be a serious contender for power but it's really a
different ballgame"
"Less than straightforward graphic features"
"...it does contain almost all the advanced features that you can get from
SAS"
"...where Stata excels is in its very powerful data handling abilities"
"...but it also extends to very powerful manipulations and analyses"
"Graphics very good but a little slow"
"SPSS has more bells and whistles and colour and multiple windows etc"
"Stata is by far the easiest to learn" (SAS, S+/R and Stata)
"Stata was relatively easy to learn"
"The biggest annoying drawback is that industry doesn't use STATA!"
"The manuals and help are very useful"
"...found STATA much easier and much more user friendly than SAS"
"...It is a very flexible package, much more user friendly than SAS"
"The data manipulation is powerful and quite easy to learn"
"...the commands are easy to learn"
"Graphics are excellent, if a little slow"
"STATA is extremely powerful"
"...it does seem to take quite a while for a graph to be displayed"
"The tabular output is not of such a high standard"
"...the outputs are only in text form, unlike in SPSS where they have nicely
drawn tables"
"The syntax of the commands is simple so quite easy to learn"
"Stata is a very user-friendly package"
"Manuals are voluminous and excellent, with very good examples"
"It is very fast, very flexible and with a huge repertoire of routines"
"Graphics are flexible in Stata, although they may be difficult to use"
"The main drawback with STATA as opposed to SAS is that you can only work
with one dataset at once"
"I would strongly recommend Stata"
"There is excellent support from the Stata Corporation"
"STATA has a very good online help system"
"Graphics are easy to use although need work to be of sufficient quality for
publication"
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