Advantages and Disadvantages of Professional and Free Software for Teaching Statistics

Abstract

– Teaching statistics leads to the problem of choosing software and appropriate solutions for necessary statistical course content. Although Excel is a common tool used in the statistical analysis, it is not in general a statistical tool. There are professional commercial statistical packages, such as SPSS and SAS, but they are expensive and therefore are not provided for undergraduate students or individual users. As an alternative way for the data analysis is to use free software. One of the most frequently used software in scientific research is dynamic open-source software and environment R.