I have written about several free alternatives to SPSS, including PSPP, Jamovi, and JASP. Bob Munchen has reviewed a few more options: Deducer, RKWard, Rattle, and the good old R Commander (in the screenshot on the left). We also find a review of Blue Sky Statistics. Blue Sky Statistics is another option for those seeking SPSS “simplicity” with R power underneath.
Blue Sky Statistics is available for Windows, and is open source. They make money from paid support. I note that it comes with a polished interface and this data editor that reminds us of Excel. I was very happy to see that Blue Sky Statistics offers many options for data handling, like recoding, merging, computing variables, or subsetting — that’s much better than what say jamovi offers at the moment.
The dialogs are quite intuitive if you are familiar with SPSS, and they can also produce R code. This is a feature we know from the R Commander, and ostensibly the aim is to allow users to wean from the graphical interface and move to the console. Nice as the idea is, it is defeated by custom commands like BSkyOpenNewDataset() that we don’t normally use.
The models offered by Blue Sky Statistics are fine for many uses — for those not living on the cutting edge. A nice touch are the interactive tables in the output, where you can customize to some degree.
Exciting as Blue Sky Statistics and other GUI are at first sight, I’m gradually becoming less excited about GUI for R. Probably the biggest challenge is the “hey, this is all text!” shock when you first open R (or typically Rstudio these days). Once you realize that the biggest challenge is to make the right choices and then interpret your results, you become less hung up about the “right” software. Once you realize that you’ll have to remember either way — where to click, or what to type — copying and pasting code fragments becomes less daunting. If you restrict yourself to a few basic commands like lm(), plot(), and summary(), R isn’t that difficult. Sure, when you come across idiosyncrasies because different developers use different naming conventions, R can be hard. But then, there are also the moments where you realize that there are so many ready-made solutions (i.e. packages) available and that with R you really are in control of your analysis. And the day you learn about replication and knitr, there’s hardly a way back.
One reason I kept looking for GUI was my MA students. I’m excited to see more and more of them choosing Rstudio over SPSS (they are given the choice, we’re currently use both in parallel)… so I there might be simply no need for turning R into SPSS.
Didier Ruedin 