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RE: st: RE: labels on bar graphs
I agree that Nick's prediction is true for the population of Stata
users and would-be users whose next best alternative would be another
bona fide statistical package like, perhaps, R or SAS.
But for the population of users and would-be users whose next best
alternative would be a basic spreadsheet/graphing program like Excel,
where you can designate percentage formats in graphs and tables with
the click of a button, this convenience and others (like reliably
copying and pasting tables to a Word document) would greatly outweigh
the marginal benefit of another arcane estimation method.
The former group is apparently the perceived market for Stata and
probably the large majority of current users. But the latter group is
orders of magnitude larger.
Attracting even a tiny fraction of Excel users would no doubt
increase Stata's user base significantly. I am not advocating that
Stata should try to compete head-to-head with Excel (heaven forbid!).
But a few conveniences that benefit a large number of users and
particularly prospective users seems like a better investment than
adding highly specialized statistical estimators destined to be used
only by a limited and highly sophisticated set of users.
David Radwin
At 7:40 PM +0100 6/30/08, Nick Cox wrote:
In a crunch I imagine that most users would
prefer StataCorp to make the impossible possible, rather than make the
awkward easy.
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