Statistics Open For All

SOFA Statistics has now reached the 20,000 download milestone on Sourceforge. And the rate of downloading has been accelerating. In May 2009 there were only 30 downloads whereas in September 2010 there were well over 100 times that. The main area of work at the moment is getting ready for a version 1.0 release. Follow this blog or the twitter feed (http://twitter.com/sofastatistics) to stay informed.

20,000 downloads

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 …

Themed Scatterplots

and histograms:

Example Histogram

All support charts are also themed now:

Themed ANOVA output

Tool tips now display arrows with their border colour controlled by the selected theme:

Themed tooltips

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.

Version 0.9.17 adds dynamic and attractive line and area charts to SOFA Statistics. These are in addition to the existing bar charts, clustered bar charts, and pie charts.

Example line chart

Example multiple Line Chart

Example Area Chart

The latest version also features a smaller javascript file for faster loading of charts, and y-axis labelling to charts.

There are also two important bug fixes:

• Fixed bug when importing csv files with non-ascii characters.
• Fixed bug with use of filters of string values – e.g. `gender` = “Male” – in charting.

SOFA Statistics now has attractive and dynamic Clustered Bar Charts and Pie Charts (as well as the Simple Bar Charts introduced previously).

Example Pie Chart

Example clustered bar chart

SOFA charts are dynamic and respond when you move the mouse over them. Unfortunately, the charting library (Dojo) doesn’t work well with WordPress, so static snapshots have been included in this post instead. A live example can be found in the SOFA features page.

It is also possible to style the charts using themes like Grey Spirals and Pebbles.

Styled Pie Charts

The other change for charts is the addition of percentage as well as frequency in the tool tips.

The other significant changes are:

• More improvements to installation process, especially on top of existing installations.
• More robust CSV and ODS importing. E.g. SOFA now copes if a field contains double quotes e.g. I enjoyed watching “Inception”

There have also been a number of important bug fixes:

• Fixed problems with csv and ods importing when fields contain double quotes.
• Fixed open office calc import bug when value not in first item of element.
• ODS importing now handles empty formulae cells properly.
• Removed further bugs affecting installation, especially on top of existing installations.
• Fixed bug when hitting enter in text browse control.
• Fixed bug when multiple themes in use for charts in report where only most recent would set the highlighting function. Now operational on a chart-by-chart basis.
• Fixed busy cursor bug when entering faulty data into filter.
• Fixed bug when opening filter dialog from within chart dialog. Was unable to re-enter dialog if exited it.
• Fixed bug in display of group by values after opening chart dialog after an indep 2 vars dialog (e.g. ANOVA) and changing group by var.

You can download the latest version of SOFA Statistics at SOFA Statistics Downloads.