Microsoft Excel and SPSS 20

[Rajeshms]

Hi All,

I would like to know the main differences between Excel and SPSS. I think the most of the works can be done using Excel itself, In this case why anyone would like to use SPSS. I have heard SPSS is better ,can do more and everything. So I would like to know what SPSS has which is not in Excel and why one should use SPSS in front of Excel, at least some main points will be good.

This justification will be really a great help for me to learn more.Thank you in advance.

With best wishes,

--

Rajesh M S

[Marta Garcia-Granero]

El 18/04/2012 7:33, Rajeshms escribió:
> Hi All,
>
> I would like to know the main differences between Excel and SPSS. I
> think the most of the works can be done using Excel itself, In this
> case why anyone would like to use SPSS. I have heard SPSS is better
> ,can do more and everything. So I would like to know what SPSS has
> which is not in Excel and why one should use SPSS in front of Excel,
> at least some main points will be good.

Hi Rajesh:

Excel is a spreadsheet, not an statistical package like SPSS. Although
Excel has built in statistical functions (many of the of low quality,
like the variance, an many distribution functions), you should not use
it for serious research. You can find a lot of criticisms to the use of
Excel if you Google a bit. Here is one (although not really negative, I
have seen some much worser -see below-):

http://www.stanford.edu/group/ssds/cgi-bin/drupal/files/Guides/software_docs_excel.pdf

The author states:

"Statistical data analysis in Excel is not recommended for analyzing
datasets with a large sample size or a
large number of variables, performing advanced statistical analyses, or
for projects in which a number of
procedures need to be performed. In addition, Excel requires the data be
set up differently than most
other statistical software packages (e.g., SPSS, Stata, and SAS). As
such, we recommend against using
Excel for simple procedures and subsequently using statistical software
for advanced procedures. It is
more efficient to use statistical software for the entire analysis if
you know you will need it for any part
of the project"

These two reviews should open your eyes:

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jcryer/JSMTalk2001.pdf
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelreg.pdf

You can read in one of them: "Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Excel for
Statistics!"

I happen to have studied the subject a lot, because I use Excel, and
teach it at the University too, but I have replaced any faulty function
by VBA code (surprisingly similar to SPSS MATRIX language, BTW), both
mine or written by experts (like Ian Smith's replacement for every
statistical distribution function) and I ALWAYS avoid the add-in Data
analysis Pack. I tried the demo of the add-in Analise-it, and found it
user friendly, but too simple. You can find others, like Unistat,
XLStat, QIMacros... I don't know if they rewrote the faulty functions or
rely on them.

Best regards,
Marta GG

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[David Marso]

"I think the most of the works can be done using Excel itself"...
I see you have either 1. put very little thought into this statement, 2. you require only the most trivial of calculations or 3. you don't give a damn about the accuracy of the results... 4.  You are doing government work or marketing research?
--

Rajeshms wrote

Hi All,

I would like to know the main differences between Excel and SPSS. I think
the most of the works can be done using Excel itself, In this case why
anyone would like to use SPSS. I have heard SPSS is better ,can do more and
everything. So I would like to know what SPSS has which is not in Excel and
why one should use SPSS in front of Excel, at least some main points will
be good.

This justification will be really a great help for me to learn more.Thank
you in advance.


With best wishes,

--
Rajesh M S