[P1] SPSS 11

[Paul Bernhardt]

Mark Chapman said on 4/29/03 8:28 PM:

>With anticipation I installed SPSS 11.0 on my iBook (500 Mhz, first 
>generation icebook). This is the first version of SPSS that runs 
>native on OS X.
>
>Unfortunately, it is almost unusable for two reasons:
>
>1. Data entry is painfully slow. With very little effort I can type 
>faster than it can handle. This would not be so bad except if you 
>type something and press the tab key it takes an abnormally long time 
>to register and thus sometimes misses what you have typed altogether.
>
>2. In Data View when I press the num lock key it chooses to treat the 
>number pad as directional arrows rather than numbers. This makes it 
>unusable for data entry on my iBook.
>
>Has anybody had similar experiences? If so do you know how to fix them?
>
>Thanks
>-- 
>  Mark Chapman - Centre for the Study of Religion - University of Toronto

SPSS = Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. Origins of the 
program was in the 1960s for use on time-shared mainframe computers. By 
the 1980s it was being ported package by package (a package was a set of 
associated commands for implementing a particular stats technique) to 
desktop PCs. Pretty much everything was 'batch processed' meaning you 
wrote out long command syntaxes which operated on an identified data file 
and output to another data file or directly to a printer. About 1996 SPSS 
came out with a windows interface. The windows interface was actually 
pretty good, allowing you to select options from dialog boxes rather than 
previously typing in commands. You then 'pasted' the command to a syntax 
window which you could edit for commands not yet included in the dialog 
boxes (the underlying system was still there). The dialog boxes being 
merely a front end on top of the old system (just like Windows 95 and 
98!). The current version is not too different.

It is easily the most accessible high end stats package.

However, for my money, JMP is the way to go on a Mac. JMP is by SAS 
institute and was originally written for the Mac as a Wysiwyg environment 
for SAS algorithms. As Mac market share declined, JMP was ported to 
Windows. The current Mac version shows that the primary environment is 
Windows, meaning lots of counterintuitive approaches compared to the 
previous versions of JMP. 

I don't have SPSS 11 on my mac... so, I don't know the answer to the 
question. You might do better to ask it on a statistics discussion group.

Paul