Gretl

The ideal statistical software for teaching would be powerful, easy to learn and free.  Stata, SPSS and SAS are powerful and relatively easy to learn, but not exactly free.  R is free and very powerful, but has a long-toed learning curve (see previous discussion on software package preferences  here).  At one point I toyed with PSPP (an open-source knock-off of SPSS) but it is a very poor substitute and not worth anyone's time.  Now I've found Gretl (The GNU Regression, Econometric and Time-Series Library).  Gretl is a stand-alone open-source cross-platform package.  It can directly import files from Stata 9, Excel, csv and several other formats, although the imports do not always proceed smoothly.   It uses menus or scripting, and it can invoke R  for more sophisticated analysis and graphing (if R is installed).  The built-in routines include the expected (e.g., ols and logit) as well as time-series and some arcana (3sls).  The post-estimation analyses are first rate.  Gretl won't supplant Stata on my personal desktop any time soon, but it's worth considering for the classroom if you are teaching statistics to law students with Excel or Datadesk. 

Comments

[raivo pommer -eesti.]

Der Letzte Sweinebrate

Männliche Ferkel werden kastriert, um dem Fleisch den sogenannten, an Urin erinnernden Ebergeruch zu nehmen. Von heute an darf der Eingriff nur noch unter Verabreichung von Schmerzmitteln vorgenommen werden. Tierschutzverbände haben dies gefordert. Hinter der Entscheidung steht aber auch der Lebensmittelhandel, der sich positiv darstellen will, wie der Agrarbiologe Eberhard von Borell erklärt. Den Schmerz bei der Operation könne man mit der Methode allerdings nicht vollständig blockieren, nur den Wundschmerz danach. Für die völlige Ausschaltung brauchte man eine Vollnarkose.

Herr von Borell, bislang hielten Landwirte die wenige Tage alten Ferkel lediglich fest, schnitten die Haut auf und entfernten die Hoden. Sie sind der deutsche Vertreter in einem Expertennetzwerk, das die Europäische Kommission hinsichtlich der Ferkelkastration berät. Nun setzt Deutschland nach jahrelanger Debatte als eines der ersten Länder Schmerzmittel ein. Wie kam es dazu?

[Tracy Lightcap]

I looked at GRETL and I'm impressed! For the kind of thing it does it looks pretty easy to use and has a very full command set.

For my purposes (undergrad education), however, R-COMMANDER is a better choice. It has a full complement of techniques for handling tables and simple graphs. I'm going to run a methods class using the Commander on a trial basis next semester.

GRETL goes in the evaluation line for more advanced use, however; we have GOT to find cheaper stats engines!

[C. Zorn]

For what it's worth, R running John Fox's R-commander package/interface is just about as easy as SPSS. (To paraphrase our friends at Geico, it's so simple an undergraduate could use it). R-commander also gives you the R commands in a back window, which is useful once people hit the upper limit of its capabilities.

[Joe Doherty]

I wasn't able to install it on my Ubuntu desktop after several hours of trying. I didn't try to install it on my Fedora machine, and that might have been the difference, but I wasn't going to spend the time figuring out the dependencies. Most importantly, I was looking for something that could be easily distributed to a class, and this wasn't it. I'll take another look, though.

[Michael Graham]

Why didn't you like about PSPP? I've found it to be a most valuable tool. It's intuitive, easy to use, fast, and a very flexible free version of spss.