Recommendations for a replacement for excel?

sweet-rasmus

Hi, I'm using Excel 2008 for the mac but I find it too slow when dealing with files containing ~11,000 rows and 6 columns. I need to process these a lot, just to make scatter plots and I'm sick of the waiting around after each edit. Also, the lack of a graph template option does my head in. Would Numbers '09 (iWork) be any good? Some body please save me from all this waiting!

Thomas_S_Hunterson

For scatter plots and graphs, use a proper statistical package like R (free and open-source, and the best in my opinion), SAS (expensive and proprietary) or minitab (also expensive but easy to learn).

They are better equipped to deal with large amounts of data, although there will be a bit of learning involved.

Victor

Sean_K wrote: »

minitab (also expensive but easy to learn).

Student copy is about $99, although without certain functions.

Would Excel 2003 be better?

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Victor wrote: »

Student copy is about $99, although without certain functions.

Would Excel 2003 be better?

Excel really isn't built for work like this. It doesn't cope with large datasets.

sweet-rasmus

I'll have a look at your suggestions Sean_K. A bit of learning I can do, but not too much! I had been using excel X before but it is quite different to the latest one. Doesn't look as pretty at all! And you have the same slow problem, though I can't remember if it had templates... I think it did. Originally I was sticking with excel because it's what my boss uses and he likes to be able to edit stuff as he pleases, but I'm up for trying new things.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

sweet-rasmus wrote: »

A bit of learning I can do, but not too much!

There will be quite a bit, regardless of which one you look at, but once you get going, you'll find they're a lot more versatile and useful.

R can be downloaded here: http://www.r-project.org/

It initially looks quite intimidating as you're interacting with a command line, but it becomes very intuitive, especially if you've any programming experience and the online documentation is excellent.

sweet-rasmus

Yes, have downloaded R now and some manuals. Quite a change from excel, but I know you are right, you have to learn a bit to use a decent program. I have no programming experience, so I'm in at the deep end here. I'd say I should set myself aside a few hours at the weekend and see what I can learn. If only it was as easy as importing a csv file and hitting 'graph' *sigh*

banquo

Google Documents

Thomas_S_Hunterson

sweet-rasmus wrote: »

Yes, have downloaded R now and some manuals. Quite a change from excel, but I know you are right, you have to learn a bit to use a decent program. I have no programming experience, so I'm in at the deep end here. I'd say I should set myself aside a few hours at the weekend and see what I can learn. If only it was as easy as importing a csv file and hitting 'graph' *sigh*

Well to get you started, let's say you had a 4 column csv dataset with comumn headers x, y, z, w.

To import it, use:

mydataset <- read.csv(file.choose(), header=TRUE)
attach(mydataset)

Then to start plotting graphs, try some of the following commands:

boxplot(mydataset)
plot(y ~ x)
plot(y ~ w)
plot(x, type="c")

For help with any command, just prefix it with a ?, eg for help on the plot command, use ?plot

sweet-rasmus

thanks a mill! that's a great way to get me started.