Da Facto: SAS or SPSS

Friday, September 14, 2007

SAS or SPSS

Someone asked me the other day if I prefered SAS or SPSS. As with so many other things, it depends. Here is a very good discussion on the differences between the two packages. From my perspective, you only go with SAS if you need their functionality, typically required if you are conducting very advanced statistics or handling very large data sets. Also, their support is very good (which you need because their product is complicated) and a very complete product suite (think end-to-end.) SPSS is much more user friendly and produces better looking output that can be easily imported into Office applications. But their product suite is a little more limited. They also have solutions, but they are more of a research focused company. So, for my everyday use, I like SPSS, but like to have access to SAS for when I need the big guns. If you would like to talk about the differences, feel free to drop me a line at ken.rona@gmail.com. I am happy to offer guidance.

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