In my attempts to fight spreadsheet mayhem, I am often evangelical in pushing for more robust tools such as true statistics software (R, Stata, and the like). Recently, I was challenged on this view by someone who stated flat out that they simply will not learn to program. I would like to provide them with data analysis tools that require no programming (but ideally which would extend to programming if they decide to dip a toe into the water later). What packages are out there for data exploration that I can recommend with a straight face?
Data Exploration Software – Easy Yet Robust Solutions for Visualization
data visualizationsoftware
Best Answer
I program in Python for 95% of my work and the rest in R or MATLAB or IDL/PV-WAVE (and soon SAS). But, I am in an environment where time-to-results is often a huge driver of the analysis chosen and so I often use point-and-click tools as well. In my experience, there is no single, robust, flexible GUI tool for doing analytics, much like there is not a single language. I typically cobble together a collection of the following free and commercial software
I have not used JMP, Stata, Statistica, etc, but would like to.
Using these tools involves learning different GUIs and multiple abstractions of modeling, which is a pain at the time but let's me get faster ad hoc results later. I am in the same boat as the OP because while most of the folks I work with are really smart, they do not care to learn a language, nor multiple GUIs and application specific terminology. So, I have resigned myself to accepting that Excel drives 90% of analysis in the business world. Accordingly, I am looking in to using things like pyinex to let me provide better analytics to the same Excel presentation layer that the vast majority of my colleagues expect.
UPDATE: Continuing down the Do-modeling-with-programming-but-make-Excel-the-presentation-layer theme, I just came across this guy's website offering Tufte-style graphics to embed in Excel cells. Simply awesome and free!