Re: st: RE: RE: Stata Wish List

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@nd.edu>]

At 02:52 PM 10/21/2004 +0100, Nick Cox wrote:
> I'd turn the discussion about output aesthetics
> around. I'm interested in learning if anyone
> thought that anyone else was claiming that
> statistical program output _was_ typically
> suitable for straight reproduction in reports.
First off, while I cut and paste output from SPSS and Stata all the time 
into my class handouts (partly to show how to interpret them), I never do 
such a cut and paste for my own research papers.  Students sometimes do 
such cut and pastes for their own papers, and I point out to them the 
deficiencies of doing so.

Having said that, I strongly suspect that lots of people somewhere are 
doing cut and pastes of SPSS output into reports.  I just checked, and SPSS 
provides more than 50 style options for the formatting and layout of 
tables.  And, you can do stuff like edit the tables, change the # of 
decimal places displayed, delete stuff you don't want, change the fonts, 
create your own styles, choose a different style for a table you've already 
created, etc; i.e. it lets you address most of the issues that Nick raises 
as limitations of statistical output.  I don't think it would provide all 
these options unless it thought there was a market for them.

As a sidelight, you have to look really really hard on the SPSS web site to 
find that SPSS originally stood for "Statistical Package for the Social 
Sciences."  I don't think they want their current business users to know 
that!  I bet social scientists are a pretty small part of their revenue 
stream now.

-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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