Statistics Open For All

Creating and sharing a software project is a leap into the unknown. Will anyone use it? Will anyone like it? And although download numbers are a very imperfect measure, they can provide encouragement when engaged in the numerous tasks associated with a project. So it is with great pleasure that I can announce SOFA Statistics has passed the 150,000 milestone on Sourceforge.

Thanks to all the people who have helped make this possible. I’m still thinking about what to do with SOFA next but it seems to have found a niche as a general purpose, open source statistics application. And I’m still trying to stay true to the mantra “ease of use, learn as you go, and beautiful output”.

If you’ve liked using SOFA, please consider sending me a brief message at grant@sofastatistics.com. I’m keen to hear where in the world people are from, what sorts of things SOFA has been used for, and anything else interesting. Please include at least your first name – I’d like to display some of these messages to promote SOFA. Thanks in advance. [Note – my purpose is to collect some feedback to share, not to gather email addresses. But I expect I will personally reply to a few emails if I have time.]

A helpful user drew my attention to the desirability of adding a small but important feature for dissertation students – namely, the ability to leave the percentage symbol off the numbers in the percentage columns of frequency and cross tabulation report tables. This new feature will be in the forthcoming version of SOFA (1.1.4):

Here is the feedback from Doug:

For dissertation writing in the States, Turabian 7th edition and the Chicago Manual of Style 6th edition are standard for many graduate schools on both the masters and the doctoral level. In both cases, tables with percentage figures in them do NOT have percent signs in front of the numbers themselves, because a typical title like “Table 3. % of babies born to men over 40” already tells you what’s inside the table.

Sofa Stats, however, so far as I can see, requires that percentages have the percent sign, which then gets dragged-and-dropped into Word (or Excel, for tidying up first). If the table is a small one, and if there are only one or two, no problem. But many dissertations have tons of them.

There is a way to rid a table of the % signs by using Excel, but it’s awkward and not a part of the regular menu system. I just worked it out myself a few hours ago, after spending half a day on the problem.

What would be *extremely* helpful to graduate students, whom I assume you would like to have as one of your key user groups, would be for you to program in a “switch” that would allow the user to specify percentages with or without percent signs. It’s a small detail, but one that would be much appreciated.

I generally try to avoid adding more features to SOFA in favour of keeping it simple but this seemed a good idea. Thanks again for the feedback Doug.