Member Training: What’s the Best Statistical Package for You?

Choosing statistical software is part of The Fundamentals of Statistical Skill and is necessary to learning a second software (something we recommend to anyone progressing from Stage 2 to Stage 3 and beyond).

You have many choices for software to analyze your data: R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata, among others. They are all quite good, but each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses.


In this webinar, you’ll see the areas where these four packages shine and where they fall short, decide which ones are best for your particular needs, and review their historical development.

This training also includes statistical software JMP, MPlus, AMOS, S, S-PLUS, and PASW, as well as mentioning non-statistical software Python, git/github, Jupyter, Linux, and SQL.

You’ll also learn why you should keep your data very, very, far away from Microsoft Excel, and what non-statistical programming skills you should develop.

This webinar will teach you how to choose a statistical software package that is best suited to your research.


Note: This training is an exclusive benefit to members of the Statistically Speaking Membership Program and part of the Stat’s Amore Trainings Series. Each Stat’s Amore Training is approximately 90 minutes long.
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About the Instructor

Steve Simon works as an independent statistical consultant and as a part-time faculty member in the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has previously worked at Children’s Mercy Hospital, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and Bowling Green State University.

Steve has over 90 peer-reviewed publications, four of which have won major awards. He has written one book, Statistical Evidence in Medical Trials, and is the author of a major website about Statistics, Research Design, and Evidence Based Medicine, www.pmean.com. One of his current areas of interest is using Bayesian models to forecast patient accrual in clinical trials. Steve received a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Iowa in 1982.

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You'll get access to this training webinar, 130+ other stats trainings, a pathway to work through the trainings that you need — plus the expert guidance you need to build statistical skill with live Q&A sessions and an ask-a-mentor forum.

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