Again, it’s also very complicated to learn but unlike R Project, it does have extensive RStudio webinars and tutorial videos to help learn how to use it. You can run RStudio either on your Mac desktop or via a server. RStudio is similar to R Project in that it’s powerful and free but is more of a statistics and data manipulation tool than a GUI statistics tool. If you’re a student however or on a budget, if you can invest the time, you get a lot out of R for free. Stata is a far better option for day-to-day analyses but R does have more procedures, albeit it’s harder to use. Stata may be expensive but you do get full support, clear documentation and automatic updates which you don’t get in R Project. The other thing to bear in mind is that you get what you pay for when it comes to statistical software. These include things such as robust or bootstrap standard errors and generalized linear mixed models which have more features and are better implemented in Stata. You’ll also find that you have to do things manually in R which are automated in commercial software such as Stata. You can however make things a bit easier by installing a Graphical User Interface (GUI) such as R Commander and there are various books on how to use R with R Commander to help you.

Since R Project is completely open source and developed for free by various contributors, there has been little effort to make it accessible to newcomers. However, compared to Wizard the learning curve of R is very steep indeed as you can see from the R Project manual. R Project is an amazingly powerful but free tool for statisticians and researchers which can do pretty much everything the commercial software Stata can do and more. Apple Numbers (Free El Capitan+ / $19.99 Mac App Store)

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