All -- quick question just to get some feedback. My employer let me know today that we would be moving from SAS to minitab effective 1/1/2012. Anyone have any experience with this tool? I'm vaguely familiar with the name but really don't know much about it. I'm guessing it's going to be a downgrade overall but our datasets are not huge (under 200k observations with under 10 data points per observation).

Expected issues? I primarily used SAS for regression analysis (ols, 2sls, probit/logit, tobit, some GARCH, etc etc) -- will this be an issue in minitab? Steep learning curve? As it stands now, we're not supposed to use 'freeware' (e.g. gretl, R) so that's not really an option.

Will I love it? Will I hate it? Reduced functionality?

12/7/2011 5:26:50 PM

No idea about minitab. Just curious, why the hardline against freeware?

12/7/2011 9:05:44 PM

Beats me -- it's very political and I think certain departments like to be able to validate and understand everything we do. So, the bright solution to that problem was to all use the same tool. Hence the corporate tool. I'd much prefer to stay with SAS as Im used to it or even Gretl as it's painfully easy and quick for basic regressions.

12/7/2011 11:56:51 PM

Does your company do 6 sigma training? If not, they may be going to it and many 6 sigma classes use minitab exclusively.

12/8/2011 12:49:54 PM

That sucks, I would much rather use SAS. The only experience with mintab is just playing around with it one day, reminded me of SPSS as it was more point and click. Just guessing, it would probably be able to do all that you listed pretty easily, not sure on data manipulation though, that is where I love SAS.

12/8/2011 8:29:47 PM

I just looked up SAS. They look nothing alike. Minitab is like a more powerful Excel used to do more complex statistical plots and analysis than what is available with Excel.

12/11/2011 9:14:06 PM

^^^ It gets name-dropped quite a bit as we're an outsourced IT company so we harp on incorporating best practices but as a service (not product) provider, its more of the concept and less of the practice itself (from what I understand about it).

Yeah, I was afraid of the point and click -- I don't want to run into something and hit a wall because of the tool's limitations.

Oh well, 1/1/12 here I come!

12/18/2011 3:39:11 PM

yeah, youll be able to everything you do in mini tab but it will be different than sas (like they said, think advanced excel)


if you have any pull, I'd push to use R. Probably more of a learning curve but I think it will take you a lot further

1/12/2012 11:13:29 PM

^

1/12/2012 11:19:38 PM

yeah, youll be able to everything you do in mini tab but it will be different than sas (like they said, think advanced excel)


if you have any pull, I'd push to use R. Probably more of a learning curve but I think it will take you a lot further

1/12/2012 11:23:51 PM

Quote :

"So, the bright solution to that problem was to all use the same tool."

in theory, a perfectly reasonable approach.

in practice... not so much.

1/20/2012 12:47:09 AM