RE: st: RE: labels on bar graphs

[David Radwin <radwin@berkeley.edu>]

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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