What's your favorite data analysis and graphing program?

[CyberMaxx]

Recently I've found that I want more out of my current data analysis software (Origin Pro) than simple statistics and graphing. My data sets are getting larger and processing them by hand in spreadsheet format just takes too much time. For that reason I want to start programming and automating much of my data analysis and graphing.

Since learning how to do this is a little labor intensive I want to be sure that I'm using the right software before I spend time learning how to program it or use its macros. At this point I'm deciding between Origin Pro, Igor Pro, MATLAB, and SciPy, but would like to know what everyone here uses for data analysis and what you guys think is the best software or software combination?

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[Neuronix]

I do all my stats in SPSS and Excel, but simple "back of the envelope" stuff with OpenEpi (www.openepi.com).

For real calculations (large matrices, image analysis), I started my career with IDL but mostly use Matlab for the past few years. ImageJ has some cool stuff too for image processing.

 

[gbwillner]

R can pretty much do anything, is free, and has good support with a viable community. The learning curve is also low if you can script or know unix.

 

[dechristine]

MATLAB is my favorite program for data analysis. The MATLAB language is basically C++ with slightly more intuitive function names and a very helpful command window. Of course, MATLAB would be a good fit if you're working with matrices of data -- unfortunately, I don't have much experience with the other programs you listed (except I wouldn't chose Mathematica, as my impression is that it's mostly good at solving math equations).

 

[phonyreal98]

SAS?

 

[mercaptovizadeh]

GraphPad, only because it makes nice graphs for publications. I know it's not up there with the big software packages in terms of the statistics and computation.

 

[URHere]

I pretend to like Origin so the biophysicists in lab don't judge me…but I always come back to Prism in the end. So simple to use, plays nicely with Excel, and makes it easy to format images.

Matlab gives me flashbacks to my brief (misguided) foray into computational neuroscience, but is also a solid option. Excel makes me want to break things.

 

[Elixir6]

GraphPad because its easy, I don't need complicated stats, and mostly, because my department has a departmental license so its free for me

 

[jjmack]

Personally, I'm a fan of Stata for small stuff and R for large GWAS size figures.

 

[wholeheartedly]

We use STATA and SAS and sometimes JMP in my epidemiology program? SAS generally isn't regarded as the most user friendly by m classmates who've used R. So, R is on my list of things to learn.

 

[JoshSt]

I've tried about half the list and honestly hate them all. The poll is useful in that I can explore using some of the programs I haven't heard of.