Hi Rob/Group

I have been playing with R a lot in the last few weeks and I am completely sold on it. However trying to sell it to others here is hard because they are stuck in SPSS mode and afraid of the steep initial learning curve with script based editing. Basically I need to teach them statistics and programming in one hit, which is difficult to say the least, worse so when I am learning the language at the same time.

So after surfing the web for a while I came across R Commander (http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr/ ). It is a simple GUI that has non-threatening menus similar to SPSS. R Commander provides most basic statistical and graphing methods under the menus and can easily import most common data formats from the menus. It is available on Win, Mac (may be buggy) and Linux (tested on red hat).

Now I know that to have complete control of analysis, scripting is best but this GUI can soften the introduction because it also provides a scripting window that displays the commands that the GUI sends to R, and then outputs to the R-console screen. Basically students, first time users etc... can see the code required to run simple tests and graph results. I use it in the same manner as the macro recorder in Excel. I run something and then study the code and adapt it to more complex scripts I am writing.

There are less options to run 'advanced models' but they can easily be added by advanced users by creating new menu items and linking them to scripts. Although I guess anyone who is at that advanced level can probably do the analysis purely through scripting and realizes the limits of SPSS etc... i.e. you are limited by how much you can customize the analysis (hence we use R).

Anyone who wants to install the program can type...

> install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies=TRUE)

...directly into the R Console. I found that some CRAN mirrors do not seem to have all packages (strange?) but Australia (QLD) seems to do pretty good.

In summary anyone who gets put off by the steep learning curve of R and is coming from a SPSS, Statistica etc... background may want to give this a crack. It could also be a good first intro to R for students. The author seems very approachable too and is keen to hear about users experiences. The link above includes zip files for direct loading (but does not contain the dependencies i.e. other packages it needs to install to allow certain features) and a PDF of a journal article written about the software.

Hope that helps people.
--
Nick Flyger

Senior Biomechanist
Centre for Biomechanics,
Institut Sukan Negara Malaysia,
Komplex Sukan Negara,
Bukit Jalil, Sri Petaling
PO Box 10440, 50174 Kuala Lumpur,
MALAYSIA