Re: st: Spss vs Stata

["Michael N. Mitchell" <Michael.Norman.Mitchell@gmail.com>]

Dear Yves

  I think that you validly raise an issue where SPSS is more advanced that Stata... it 
has many capabilities with respect to displaying output that Stata does not have. The 
areas that come to my mind are 1) output that is formatted in such a way that you can 
paste it right into a word document, 2) pivot tables and such, and 3) the statistical and 
graphic output is integrated together. On the other hand, I think that there is much to 
like about the way that you can work with Stata output that makes it superior to Stata. 
The two areas that come to my mind are...

  1) You can easily take Stata output and transfer it to LaTeX for creating publication 
quality output. You can see more about this at...

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/latex/default.htm

  2) You can capture the results of Stata commands and store the results as a dataset and 
then summarize the results of many analysis in a very compact format. There are many 
examples of this, one such example is shown here...

  http://www.michaelnormanmitchell.com/stow/posting-results-regression.html

  Even though the SPSS output is "prettier", the Stata method of handling output is 
ultimately more powerful and gives you more control. However, it would be nice if the 
output from Stata could (optionally) be pretty (like SPSS) as well as powerful.

  I hope that helps.... and, welcome to the list!

Best regards,

Michael N. Mitchell
Data Management Using Stata      - http://www.stata.com/bookstore/dmus.html
A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics - http://www.stata.com/bookstore/vgsg.html
Stata tidbit of the week         - http://www.MichaelNormanMitchell.com



On 2010-08-01 5.04 PM, Yves Therriault 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.
>
> Of course, I don't intent to start a controversy here.  Maybe I'm just
> an "old SPSS user" who is a little bit afraid to have to learn a new
> syntax ! : - )
>
> Finally, I just want tell you all how much I appreciate this list.
> This is a very nice and vibrant community. I'm sure that I will learn
> a lot from Stata experts as soon as I start using the software.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Yves (Province de Québec)
>
> P.S. Sorry for the bad English. I write in English just once in a while.
>
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