Overview of Key Statistical Programs: Excel, R, SPSS, and SAS (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi all, it's Elliot Jay here. So today before we get started, I just want to talk about a few of the big programs in the field, kind of what they do, why people use them, what they're good for, what they're not as good for, and what's kind of trending now as time goes on. So in psychology and other statistical fields, the four big programs that people use are Excel, R, SPSS, and SAS. And people use multiple of these, some people just use one, some people just use two, but all of them kind of provide something different. So having a good understanding of all of them can be really helpful to you as being a statistician. So first I'm going to start with Excel. So Excel, it's a Microsoft Office product. It's easily accessible, almost everybody has it because it comes in with the Office suite. So it's really easy to use. It has a nice graphical interface, that's what the GUI is for type. This lets you click and select all your options. It's relatively cheap because it comes in that package. It's used throughout the world, everywhere. The support is widespread because people pay money for it. Microsoft has great people that are available to help you if you need it. When it comes to advanced statistics, it's not really designed for it, but what it's really designed for and is best for are for graphs. So a lot of times, what people do is they import their data, or they export their data rather from other programs into Excel, and from there they're able to create really nice looking graphs. So your knowledge of Excel should at least be for graphs, but it's really useful for a lot of other things like database management and stuff like that. And as time has been going on, R is becoming more and more popular. If you see the graph, R is in red, and it was trending up a lot, went down a little bit, but it's still very, very popular for the online email lists. So R is kind of the new cutting edge type of software that is free. So because it's open source, so many people are into it. R is code-based, so instead of having a graphical interface where for the most part you're just kind of clicking and pressing buttons, instead you have to write your own code, kind of like computer code. So because of that, it kind of deters some people from using it, but if you learn how to use it, it's really powerful, and in the other videos I'll teach you guys more and more how to do it, because it's becoming more and more popular. And because of that, it's having more and more support, so there are a lot of people posting in forums, trying to help people go along, and it's best for more advanced statistics. You don't really need to run basic things in R, because it might just be easier in other programs, and it's really great for new cutting edge research. Lots of new statistical analyses are run through R. SPSS is a great program, and it's used in psychology and lots of other fields. It has a graphical interface. It's pretty expensive, it's an IBM product, but it's used so widely throughout psychology, and it's a very great program that is pretty straightforward, that it's really well recommended by many people, including myself. It has a decent support system, but a lot of it you have to go through books and read through the user's guide. As far as statistics goes, it's great at all the basic things that normal people would use, but when it comes to new cutting edge types of research and types of analyses, it lags behind slightly, but there are times where people will write code in, and it can be improved. SAS is the last program I'll talk about today. SAS is another code-based one, kind of similar to R. It's been around longer. It's relatively expensive, but there's this new university option, where at least for a while they were offering it for free to college students, so that's something you might want to look into. Generally speaking, its usage is decreasing, it's kind of being replaced by R, but it still has lots of great functions, and I think the main reason why it's decreasing is because it costs money, and perhaps that's the reason why SAS is now offering that university package. The support is, it's decent, it's similar to SPSS in that you just type in online forums and there's a manual that you can look through. It's good for advanced and complex statistics, so as we go through and add more and more videos, Dr. and Sarah and I will work to show you kind of how these work, what to use these programs for, and how to kind of get the most you can out of these programs, and it's always best to figure out what can do what, so the tools you have in each one of these are different, and if you can add all of these tools together to create a larger toolbox, so to speak, it'll leave you in a much better position to conquer your statistics, so thanks for listening.