Feature Highlights
Beauty - Attractive Output
Beautiful output is a feature, even in a statistics/analysis program! It means that SOFA output can be used for presentations or automated reporting without manual formatting or reworking. Many statistical programs do not place much emphasis on aesthetics.
Move your mouse over the bars of the chart:
Database Friendly
Many statistics programs make you import data from a database before you can use it. Not SOFA. You can connect directly to your database, and all its tables. Just give SOFA the login details. You can even edit data from within SOFA, or apply a simple data filter to focus on the subset of a table you are interested in. SOFA currently supports:
- MySQL
- Microsoft Access
- SQLite
- PostgreSQL
- Microsoft SQL Server
What if your project has data in more than one database? No problem. SOFA lets you work with any tables wherever they may be and whichever (supported) database type they are stored in.
Spreadsheet Friendly
Output
SOFA tabular output is already in a form that can be directly opened in MS Excel or pasted into OpenOffice Calc.
Importing
- SOFA can import data from Excel spreadsheets into its built-in SQLite database.
- ODS spreadsheets can be imported from both Open Office Calc and Gnumeric.
- Data in CSV or tab-separated format can be imported into SOFA Statistics.
- All imported data can be viewed and edited within SOFA.
Exporting
- SOFA can export data into an Excel spreadsheet format (readable by open source spreadsheets as well).
Data Entry Friendly
You can now add data directly to SOFA Statistics by configuring new tables in the built-in SQLite database and adding data directly to them. It is also possible to redesign and delete tables.
Easy Data Recoding
It is easy to recode your data using a simple form - e.g. if your data contains age but you need to analyse by age group you can recode MIN TO 19 as 1 with a label of "Under 20", 20 TO 39 as 2 with a label of "20-39" etc.
Output You Can Share Easily
Tabular output is in HTML, which means you can put it directly on your intranet or website, or put it in a spreadsheet.
SOFA has a wide range of attractive, high quality charts including:
- simple bar charts (freq or means)
- clustered bar charts (freq or means)
- pie charts
- single and multiple line charts (freq or means)
- area charts (freq or means)
- histograms
- scatterplots
- box and whisker plots
It is also possible to create chart series. There is even some eye candy.
Main Tests and Measures Made Easy
Most analysis uses a small subset of all available statistical options. The goal of SOFA Statistics is to make this subset as easy to use as possible.
SOFA will make it easy to conduct and report on the use of:
- Row and column percentages, with the ability to nest variables e.g look at Ethnicity and Gender vs Age
- Mean
- Median
- Lower Quartile
- Upper Quartile
- Standard Deviation
- Sum
- N items
- Min
- Max
- Range
- Pearson's Chi-Square with Contingency Tables
- Independent samples t-test
- Paired samples t-test
- One-way ANOVA
- Mann Whitney U
- Wilcoxon Signed Ranks
- Kruskal Wallis H
- Pearson's Correlation
- Spearman's Correlation
Learn As You Go
A central goal of SOFA Statistics is to make Statistics Open For All. Secondary school students, for example, should be able to use SOFA to learn more about statistics. And other users will also benefit from the educational orientation of the program.
Display worked examples based on your own data for:
- Mann-Whitney U
- Wilcoxon's Signed Ranks
- Spearman's Rho
- Pearson's Chi Square
SOFA helps users make the correct choice of test in a graphical, interactive way.
SOFA will supply visual and numerical tests which let the user know if a test is suitable for the data they are working with. Users can now view graphs showing the distribution of a selected variable against a normal distribution curve; histograms for independent t-tests and ANOVAs; and scatterplots for Pearson's and Spearman's correlation analyses.
When making tables, SOFA lets users see the impact of configuration changes in a demonstration table before running the actual analysis.
Automated Reporting
SOFA lets users export Python scripts for use in their own simple (or complex) reporting programs. Imagine running a detailed monthly report for management with a single script. Python was originally designed with beginner programmers in mind and has a gentle learning curve. Novices can become productive very soon. Python is included in the installation process and is free and open source.
Speaking your language
SOFA now has support for a variety of languages including English, Croatian, Spanish, Russian, Galician, and Breton. You can help with translation if you like: SOFA Statistics Translations
