Statistics Open For All

SOFA line charts and area charts now treat dates as dates in the x-axis which makes it easier to look at time series data.

New option added to interface

Time series selected – X-axis date aware

Time series not selected – X-axis not date-aware

Example time series chart

Additional improvements include:

• Better error message when not enough values in group to run analysis e.g. ANOVA.
• Better handling of precision in p-value results displayed.
• Better handling of dates pre-1900.
• Better messages to user about potentially excessive categories in charts.
• Add support for float years as date values for time series.
• Add support for specifying port connecting to postgresql.
• Allows boxplots when fewer values to display.

And there were two other changes:

• Removed broken google docs integration – just as easy to manually download and import normally.
• Removed two pop-ups – no longer needed.

There are also a number of bug fixes:

• No longer a missing legend in multiseries scatterplots just because the first scatterplot only had one series of data.
• Fixed bug with saving database connection details when a number involved (port).
• Fixed PostgreSQL bug when saving connection without password – now succeeds rather than failing silently.
• Fixed MySQL bug with adding rows.
• Fixed bug in Windows with checkboxes not enabling/disabling properly unless panels refreshed.

There are several ways of doing box plots. Some show outliers, some don’t. Some set the whiskers at the min and max values, some don’t. Until now, SOFA kept it simple by only allowing one approach. But sometimes a little more flexibility is needed. So now users can choose between three options:

Option 1) This is the default. Outliers are displayed. Lower whiskers are 1.5 times the Inter-Quartile Range below the lower quartile, or the minimum value, whichever is closest to the middle. Upper whiskers are calculated using the same approach.

Option 2) Outliers hidden. Lower whiskers are 1.5 times the Inter-Quartile Range below the lower quartile, or the minimum value, whichever is closest to the middle. Upper whiskers are calculated using the same approach.

Option 3) Whiskers are at the minimum and maximum values.

And SOFA displays a small note at the bottom of each box plot so it is clear what approach has been used.

Additionally version 1.4.5 adds:

• ODS importing can now cope with repeated column names.
• Better error message when unable to get regression line details because of limited variability.

And there are numerous bug fixes as well:

• Fix bug when problem with imported data.
• Fix to title and date concatenation code so doesn’t break when title has non-ascii characters e.g. in Spanish (affecting Windows and Mac)
• Reordered regression line plotting in js so appears on top of dots.
• Added zero division error trap to spearman’s test error output.
• Fixed bug which prevented ods_reader from importing repeating rows at the end of a spreadsheet. Only repeated empty rows at the end are considered the end of the data.
• Properly handle all read operations on internal-use text files e.g. proj, css etc. Can cope with a utf-8 BOM (only) to cope with Windows Notepad editing. Breaks if other encodings used which is fair enough.

We hope you like the latest version.

95% confidence intervals have now been added to ANOVA and t-tests. And associated output has right justified numbers to make it easier to read.

Version 1.3.3 also lets you sort by category labels in clustered bar charts, line charts, area charts and box plots. Area charts can also be sorted ascending or descending by count/mean/sum.

The series and category are now displayed in tooltips e.g. Italy, 20-29 for clustered bar charts, multi-series line charts, and box plots. This is especially helpful when there are lots of categories and/or series.

• Improved statistics output footnotes.
• Borders on bar-type charts are now optional. This can be useful when bars are very short.
• Chi square clustered bar charts can cope with higher default limits for number of values.
• Importing field names with more than 90 characters prohibited at the point of import rather than causing problems later.
• The group by max number of values is now controlled by a single my_globals setting (making it easier to override).
• The default settings for some remaining max values have been increased.

There was one minor bug-fix this version – line charts now cope better with lots of categories (increased padding around max label width in overall width calculations).

And a problem with the deb installer was also fixed.