Overall Satisfaction with IBM SPSS
Pros
- SPSS has been around for quite a while and has amassed a large suite of functionality. One of its longest-running features is the ability to automate SPSS via scripting, AKA "syntax." There is a very large community of practice on the internet who can help newbies to quickly scale up their automation abilities with SPSS. And SPSS allows users to save syntax scripting directly from GUI wizards and configuration windows, which can be a real life-saver if one is not an experienced coder.
- Many statistics package users are doing scientific research with an eye to publish reproducible results. SPSS allows you to save datasets and syntax scripting in a common format, facilitating attempts by peer reviewers and other researchers to quickly and easily attempt to reproduce your results. It's very portable!
- SPSS has both legacy and modern visualization suites baked into the base software, giving users an easily mountable learning curve when it comes to outputting charts and graphs. It's very easy to start with a canned look and feel of an exported chart, and then you can tweak a saved copy to change just about everything, from colors, legends, and axis scaling, to orientation, labels, and grid lines. And when you've got a chart or graph set up the way you like, you can export it as an image file, or create a template syntax to apply to new visualizations going forward.
- SPSS makes it easy for even beginner-level users to create statistical coding fields to support multidimensional analysis, ensuring that you never need to destructively modify your dataset.
- In closing, SPSS's long and successful tenure ensures that just about any question a new user may have about it can be answered with a modicum of Google-fu. There are even several fully-fledged tutorial websites out there for newbie perusal.
Cons
- SPSS syntax is somewhat archaic, no doubt due to its long tenure and a desire to maintain backwards compatibility, so it may add to the learning curve for otherwise experienced script writers.
- The syntax editing window is somewhat unwieldy when compared to modern IDEs, and can be laggy; sometimes mouse cursor accuracy is unpredictable when one attempts to select a particular word or line of syntax.
- Counterintuitively, perhaps, SPSS has so many ways to achieve the same ends -- GUI, syntax, legacy functions vs. updated functions for visualizations, etc. -- that it can be hard for new users to find the "right" (quickest, simplest, most transparent) way to do things; it's an embarrassment of riches that may confuse and overwhelm novices.
Importantly, I was able to quickly complete my analysis project across many dozens of dimension thanks to SPSS syntax, which I was able to quickly duplicate and modify as needed, dimension by dimension.
Because I was able to deliver sophisticated and significant analysis quickly and easily, my department has received a great deal of positive attention from various university officials.
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