Free Statistics

MACANOVA

MacAnova was written by Gary W. Oehlert and Christopher Bingham of the School of Statistics, University of Minnesota.
In spite of its name, MacAnova is available for all main operative systems, not just for Macintosh.
Though it has fewer capabilities and it is less extensible than R, MacAnova can be considered as a complete software, but its strengths are analysis of variance and related models, matrix algebra, time series analysis.
As R, even MacAnova is a open source software and it can be downloaded freely here (versions for Dos, Windows, Macintosh and Linux).
Among the different resources available in the website, it is essential to download the manual in pdf format "An introduction to MacAnova" , enough to learn how to work in this software.
Compared with R, MacAnova has the same type of interface (based on input given by the command line, but it has as R several window/menu/mouse type features) and a very similar way in defining variables. Besides his limitation as regards the number of functions and types of analysis, in the comparison with R another point in disfavour of MacAnova is represented by his lacks in graphics.
The way of proceeding in the analysis is the same as R: every time we carry out a kind of analysis, the software doesn't return a set of results listed sequentially, but returns intermediate results which allow to the user to proceed step by step. MacAnova can import and export data by other software (ex. Excel) by clipboard or transforming the original data to the Ascii format.

Besides the "An introduction to MacAnova", you can get helps as regards the use of different functions by the help(function) command. If you key in help("*") you get the whole list of the available functions in MacAnova.
Analysing in detail some functions of this software, we can see that a lot of commands are similar to the R ones, even if there are some differences. For example if in R a vector can be defined by the c(1,2,4,8) command , in MacAnova you have to use the vector(1,2,4,8) command. More differences are listed here. To continue the analysis later you have to save the session (save workspace).
MacAnova can be employed in statistical courses, but it can be also useful in research.

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