Re: st: Spss vs Stata

[Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com>]

SPSS, especially these days as it has become the "predictive
analytics" software rather than a statistical package for social
sciences, seems to operate from the viewpoint of "I click here, I
click there, and I drag this into a report -- voila". Stata has
traditionally been oriented at more meditative researchers in academic
settings who are less concerned with flashy presentations, as that's
rarely a selling point of a research paper. Also, SPSS is only good
under Windows, while Stata takes a lot of (well substantiated) pride
in working under all common operating systems.

A number of tools exist to go from Stata output to other external
programs, such MS Word/Excel, on one hand, and LaTeX, on the other. I
am certainly in the latter camp, and I get everything I need from
-estout- and low level -file- commands with which I write my results.
Of course there are times when I have to do some copy/paste, and
that's less convenient than from SPSS. More MS-specific tools are
available with -outreg-, -xmltab-, and probably five or so others.

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Yves Therriault <ytherriault@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Stata users,
>
> I've been using SPSS for 20 years. For the time being, I still use a
> six years old version of SPSS (12.01). For many reasons, I told my
> organisation that I would rather purchasing one licence of Stata
> instead of upgrading to the newest release of SPSS (18.0).
>
> A few months ago, I've asked former SPSS users to write about their
> experience with Stata. Generally, people who have decided to switch
> from SPSS to Stata aren't looking back.
>
> In order to learn the basics of Stata more easily when the software is
> installed on my computer, I bought 3 introductory books : A Gentle
> Introduction to Stata ; An Introduction to Stata for Health
> Researchers and, finally Data Analysis Using Stata.
>
> I'm interested to hear from those who made the switch to Stata and
> particularly about the lurning curve regarding the management of Stata
> output. Generally, Stata seems to be far more superior to SPSS in many
> ways. But, in my humble opinion, Stata is currently far behind SPSS
> concerning how it displays its output. I'm aware that a lot of
> routines have been written by Stata users to customize outputs though.
>
> Just in case Stata programmers were monitoring this list, I would be
> very pleased if the company decided to "improve" the output display in
> a future release. Perhaps, another possible feature would gave the
> user the choice between a "standard" Stata output and a Spss-like
> output.

-- 
Stas Kolenikov, also found at http://stas.kolenikov.name
Small print: I use this email account for mailing lists only.
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