>ALSO - I have not used R for biostats but was looking for an option if I do NOT have access to SPSS (only have at the office)
I thought the Data Science courses on Coursera were taught in R? That's how I learned R. I now have no desire to go back and use SPSS.
An open source version of SPSS is PSPP, it is free to download and use. Especially if you're already proficient in writing SPSS code, it's very similar, although if I remember correctly some of the syntax is a little different. But the functionality is all there.
Also, can you come to my school and do a class talk to all the MPH students who complain about having to learn biostats and try and squeak by on minimal effort without learning anything? I kid, I kid, but it's frustrating at times because of how important and applicable it is to us after graduating.
I've been using PSPP on Yosemite. It is an open source copy of SPSS. It does a lot of things that SPSS can do, though you'll have to check if it can do what you need. http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/
My mac-preferring statistician friend recently directed me to PSPP for mac. It's an open source version of SPSS. Unfortunately, I'm not a stats geek at all, so I have absolutely no clue how to make it sing and dance. But you can't beat the price...
You can take a look at PSPP. It is a free/open source alternative to SPSS.
If you choose to go with R as suggested by others, I'd recommend you consider one of the GUI frontends for it as well.
There is an open source version to SPSS, it's PSPP. I've started using this over the summer for a stats mooc course and will continue for a grad stats course starting in less than two weeks. Since I only run fedora linux on my machines, SPSS is not a choice for me so thank goodness for gnu's open source version. http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/
En idé jeg lige fik, måske du kan følge forelæsninger i et statistikfag på CBS eller RUC inden du starter?
Du kan nok også med fordel se om du kan få en kopi af Stata og en dertilhørende bog. Det er vidst det mest brugte statistiksoftware for samfundsvidenskablige forskere. Alternativer er SPSS, SAS og R, som også bruges i forskellig grad. Det er kun R som er gratis, men visse universiteter tilbyder licenser til studerende og ansatte. Hør dog lige din vejleder om hvad vedkommende vil anbefale.
edit: der findes en open source version af SPSS ved navn PSPP (der er nogen der har humor) som du frit kan hente ned. Tror det er den hurtigste vej til at komme i gang.
There's a free alternative that is nearly identical to SPSS. 98% of the work you do on one will work exactly the same on the other. When I had a stat w/computing course I just did my work on PSPP and then made sure it was the same as SPSS before I turned it in. Never had any problems.
Do you have to use excel? I've never done an exploratory factor analysis in excel although I have done the confirmatory. Here is a free program you can use to run a exploratory factor analysis, it's basically a open source version of SPSS: http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/
You can export your excel data directly into it just like SPSS. Try giving it a shot it will be a lot easier than running this in excel.