Product Reviews

Even if statistics software leaves you cold, the return of SPSS - a high-end and enormously capable data analysis and presentation suite - to the Mac is a milestone.

With a loyal following elsewhere, SPSS has invested a lot of time and money in trying to please Mac users. The port itself was performed by MacKiev, and has been extensively tested with real users, rather than just kludged to an unsatisfactorily mid-platform compromise. This product represents a strong vote of confidence in the Mac's future among academics and numerati, and is aimed at university classrooms loaded with iMacs.

Data can be imported in a wide variety of formats, and from some surprising sources. These include the SPSS portable format, Microsoft Excel, and even SAS (a rival product popular in some sectors such as banking and the pharmaceutical industry). However, Excel data does need to be formatted in a simple way, ideally with each column representing a variable, and even then you'll find yourself performing a bit of tweaking to ensure each variable is configured. This is straightforward, as the data window has two tabbed panes, one displaying data in a spreadsheet view, the other giving types and settings for each variable column.

Touch database

Database access includes support for accessing SequeLink middleware and ODBC, through Merant DataDirect plug-ins. You can also use this Mac version as a client to connect to SPSS servers on other platforms. Although SPSS has committed to a Mac OS X version of this desktop product, it's not yet clear whether it sees Mac OS X as another potential server platform.

For those needing a bit more help than is provided in the four well-produced manuals, online help is available. By asking a series of questions in Internet Explorer Web pages, the coach offers

ADVERTISEMENT

recommended procedures. When you accept its suggestions, SPSS's dialogs are opened from within Internet Explorer, leading you gently to a sound solution.

As you'd expect, SPSS incorporates its own industrial-strength scripting language. This allows you to perform more complex tasks and repeat production-level tasks with ease and efficiency. All output appears in a single output window, structured in a hierarchical system. Logging user actions into scripts is a great aid for script development, and SPSS uses the human interface well to facilitate this.

With a range of optional modules, its statistical engine is hugely capable and comprehensive. SPSS offers a good range of exploratory tools, and a very extensive collection of mainstream methods and tests. As might be expected given SPSS's origins in the social sciences, it has excellent facilities for dealing with missing values.

Although these strengths are reflected in its treatment of areas such as survival analysis, SPSS is still a wise choice for those working in many fields. Other special strengths include trend analysis, support for analysis of conjoint studies, and correspondence analysis of two-way tables. One of the few areas in which its conservative edge is noticeable is in its lack of support for bootstrap (resampling) techniques, which only appear in non-linear regression, but can be readily accomplished using scripts.

Graphing and charting are very good, but fairly conservative in tone. If you've become a fan of Tufte's series of seminal works on data visualisation, you may find these constraining, but they should cover almost anything you're likely to want to submit for publication, or theses. Sadly, there's no facility to export graphs in EPS or another format which would allow their editing in a quality design application: this is perhaps the application's only real shortcoming.

SPSS is to be commended for making the commitment in returning to the Mac, and in making sure that this Mac version is such a delight to use. It deserves to succeed, and must go to the top of the shortlist of anyone who needs serious statistical analysis. It's also an important product for Apple, as it enables many more students and lecturers in universities (and related industries) to choose the Mac.

NEEDS: Power Mac G3, 800 x 600 pixel screen or larger, Mac OS 9, QuickTime 4, 64Mb RAM, 60Mb hard disk space