Re: st: Spss vs Stata

["E. Paul Wileyto" <epw@mail.med.upenn.edu>]

My two cents.  Graphics is the only bad aspect of Stata, but SPSS is 
almost as rudimentary in graphics.  If you want publication quality 
graphics quickly, the only package to consider is SigmaPlot.  I do 
analysis in Stata, quickly collapse and reshape data for graphs, and 
copy the reshaped data into SigmaPlot.  Excel cannot match any of 
SigmaPlot's capabilities, and it exports to EPS, PDF, or JPG.  Also, you 
can copy & paste figures without background directly to powerpoint for a 
nice colored background.

Paul

On 8/2/2010 12:14 AM, Stas Kolenikov wrote:
> 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.
> >      
>    

--
E. Paul Wileyto, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics
Tobacco Use Research Center
School of Medicine, U. of Pennsylvania
3535 Market Street, Suite 4100
Philadelphia, PA  19104-3309

215-746-7147
Fax: 215-746-7140
epw@upenn.edu

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