With the arrival of version 0.9.18, SOFA Statistics now has all the main output charts working – simple and clustered bar charts, pie charts, line and area charts, histograms and scatterplots. The latest additions are scatterplots …
and histograms:
All support charts are also themed now:
Tool tips now display arrows with their border colour controlled by the selected theme:
Additional changes were:
- Charting dialog devotes more space to displaying chart output. Simplified interface design.
- Charts give sensible message if no data (perhaps because of filtering). X axis labels for clustered bar charts and multiple line line charts where legend doesn’t provide the same label.
- Pie charts slightly wider (esp on Windows, which truncates overwidth labels).
There were also some bug fixes:
- Fixed bug in Excel importing when importing numbers.
- Fixed lucid spiral colours to prevent lines having same colour as background (and being effectively invisible).
- Upgrading adds extra sofa_report_extras.
- Fixed bug when filtering means no data at all to display for normality test.
As SOFA Statistics approaches its version 1.0 release, emphasis will go on enabling chart configuration and filling in any gaps in the existing system.
I am looking forward to spending some time with SOFA Statistics. I have been watching this blog and based on what I can see here this is turning into a really nice piece of work.
I like how it is based on Python, meaning it should be very extensible yet focuses on providing a clean GUI interface for non-programmers.
I know too many social scientists who need a sane/affordable alternative to SPSS but who simply don’t have the programming chops or the statistical chops to tackle R.
I would like to see this become a OSS replacement for the SPSS crowd, leaving R to focus on the more specialized analyses. If they could be taught to talk to one another, I might have to eat my shirt. (Is it possible to use something like pyR from within SOFA or will it conflict with something? Othwise you could just move data back and forth via the database files used by both.)
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the encouragement. I would also like to carve out a niche for SOFA that complements R. The typical R-user is probably going to be a very different sort of person from a core SOFA user (one of my best friends is a major R enthusiast). Having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if some people use R for exploratory analyses and SOFA for its emphasis on attractive output (thanks to the Dojo Toolkit).
Re: pyR etc I would like to make a plug-in system for SOFA once I am happy with the core SOFA functionality (I want to add a lot more to the learn-as-you-go side of things before I consider the core complete). I don’t see any reason why that plug-in system couldn’t use pyR. I’ll have to give that a lot more thought when the time arrives.
All the best, Grant
Lead Developer, SOFA Statistics
“…R for exploratory analyses and SOFA for its emphasis on attractive output>”
Consider the alt use case: graphically based EDA using SOFA’s Xtabs & visually appealing output as an efficient way to “get a feel” for the data prior to investing the time of procedural programming in a tool like R.
Great work, glad I found you guys.