When the goers go and the stayers stay, when shirts loosen and tattoos glisten, it’s time for the statisticians and the miners and the data scientists to talk, and walk, Big Iron.
R. S-Plus. SAS. Tableau. Stata. GnuPlot. Mondrian. DataDesk. Minitab. MINITAB?????? Okay, we’ll leave the others to get back to their arm wrasslin’, but if you want to produce high quality graphs, simply, readily and quickly, then Minitab could be for you.
A commercialized version of Omnitab, Minitab appeared in Philadelphia in 1972 and has long been associated with students learning stats, but also now with business, industrial and medical/health quality management and six sigma, etc. There’s some other real ‘rough and tumble’ applications involving Minitab – DR Helsell’s ‘Statistics for Censored Environmental Data using Minitab and R’ (Wiley 2012), for instance.
IBM SPSS and Microsoft Excel can produce good graphs (‘good’ in the ‘good sense’ of John Tukey , Edward Tufte, William Cleveland, Howard Wainer, Stephen Few & Nathan Yau etc etc), with the soft pedal down and ‘caution switches’ on, but Minitab is probably going to be easier.
For example, the Statistical Consulting Centre at the University of Melbourne uses Minitab for most of its graphs (R for the trickiest ones). As well as general short courses on Minitab, R, SPSS and GenStat there’s a one day course in Minitab graphics in November, which I’ve done and can recommend.
More details on the Producing Excellent Graphics Simply (PEGS) course using Minitab at Melbourne are at
http://www.scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/pegs.html
student and academic pricing for Minitab is at http://onthehub.com/
What, I wonder, would Florence Nightingale have used for graphic software if she was alive today???
Synergistic Statistical Consulting, Analysis, Arboronics 