Some Mac-using Industrial Economics students at school asked me for help about these two topics but I couldn't provide much of it. The gist of their problems are described below. Any help of info would be appreciated. 1) Statistical software for the Mac Their econometrics professor uses EViews, which I understand is similar to SPSS but geared toward economists' needs. I found the freeware R for Mac OS X but have no idea how good it is. Any comments or pointers to other sites or other similar programs would be much appreciated. 2) Making Excel for the Mac more "Windows-like" Another Windows-using professor teaches them complicated formulas to run in Excel, but they are having difficulties because some of the commands (especially the keyboard shortcuts) are not the same. Is there a way to '"skin" Excel for the Mac (in a manner of speaking) so that you can use the keyboard in exactly the same way you use it with Excel for Windows?
You could go through this list. There is also this guide for the impoverished social scientist. Many of the software mentioned here have Mac versions, and they are FREE. Since the Mac is now Unix based, there should be many excellent scientific and mathematical software applications available. Also free does not necessarily mean of lesser quality than a commercial equivalent. This is particularly true with open source software, where the community can provide more resources for a program's development than any single commercial entity--a concept used by Apple to develop Darwin, the Mac OS open source core. A more interesting question is why is that econometrics professor encouraging students to use a $950 software package? What is he teaching, "economics of software piracy"? Perhaps he should be using r-project! There are some high level formulas that don't work the same way on the Mac version as they do in Windows. But there are workaroundsdiscussed in various forums on the web. [Edited on 9-28-2005 by Maccess]
Thanks for the help, Maccess. I will be sure to forward the advice to my student friends. As for EViews, the university has an educational license, and so it actually cost far less than $950 per copy. And the students move on to other software availabel in their companies when they start working. But you did hit a nail, if only tangentially. We have an unfortunately legacy of being tightly tied to Windows software, and maybe 90% of the poeple here have never tried anything other than Windows software. It's a lonely battle to get people to think about other using OSes (e.g., Linux, Mac) and open source software. But we're making headway. I'll recommend r-project to the people in economics.
Can you post their thoughts on the R-project? I would probably have to use Eviews for my thesis next semester. If R-project is relatively easy to handle then I might be able to use my Mac instead of my pc in doing my thesis
