DCJ Success Guide: Statistical Software

Excel can be used for descriptive statistics and for more complex analysis with the Analysis ToolPak installed (available for all versions of Excel for PC but only Excel for MAC 2016);it is strongly recommended that you be very comfortable with Excel, and that you become very familiar with the ToolPak to properly use Excel as a statistical tool.

SPSS is one of the most commonly used statistics and data analysis program in business, education, and academic research. It is available on some library computers, and is also currently available as a free download for Saint Leo students enrolled in courses that require it - your statistics course will tell you where to find it.

PSS Statistics is a statistics and data analysis program for businesses, governments, research institutes, and academic organizations. In this course, Barton Poulson takes a practical, visual, and non-mathematical approach to SPSS Statistics, explaining how to use the popular program to analyze data in ways that are difficult or impossible in spreadsheets, but which don't require you to master programming languages like Python or R. From importing spreadsheets, to making data visualizations, to calculating descriptive statistics, Barton covers all the basics, with an emphasis on clarity, interpretation, communicability, and application. This course is ideal for first-time researchers and those who want to make the most of data in their professional and academic work.

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It runs on both Window and MAC.  Download R from the project site.  If you would like a graphical user interface, download a free version of RStudio.

Trying to locate meaning and direction in big data is difficult. R can help you find your way. R is a statistical programming language to analyze and visualize the relationships between large amounts of data. This training series provides a thorough introduction to R, with detailed instruction for installing and navigating R and RStudio and hands-on examples, from exploratory graphics to neural networks. In part one, instructor Barton Poulson shows how to get R and popular R packages up and running and start importing, cleaning, and converting data for analysis. He also shows how to create visualizations such as bar charts, histograms, and scatterplots and transform categorical, qualitative, and outlier data to best meet your research questions and the requirements of your algorithms.

​​​​​​​PSPP  (download from the PSPP website) is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free alternative for SPSS, and has a similar look and feel.

It can perform descriptive statistics, T-tests, anova, linear and logistic regression, measures of association, cluster analysis, reliability and factor analysis, non-parametric tests and more.