All software programs have pros and cons. SPSS has some fairly powerful options for dealing with output. SAS has the ability to deal more easily with complex data management and can handle a fairly wide variety of analyses. Other programs handle an even wider variety of analyses. One thing that seems nearly constant, however, is that the people I have run across that make a big deal about loudly proclaiming that one package is clearly more valuable than another are those who consistently use these packages to run things like frequencies and crosstabs.

Hi Tara,

UCLA Academic Technology Services provides a good comparison between SAS, SPSS and Stata, available at: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/faq/compare_packages.htm) .

Best regards,

Nils

Hi Tara and Nils,

in my opinion the UCLA comparison is good, but a bit outdated. SAS has since moved towards user-friendliness (I mean the Guide) and SPSS towards more powerful data management (working with more files at once, greatly enhanced syntax programability using Python scripts). So you should better try the newest versions of both programs.

As for me, I prefer SAS for complex data management tasks with really huge files, and SPSS for the everyday's analytic work with small and moderate files because the work is quicker and more convenient.

Greetings

Jan

Hi, I use both statistical packages since more than 7 years. I agree with Jan that SAS is more suitable for complex data management. May be this is the reason that SAS is used as a worldwide standard in clinical trails. Moreover with complex data management and huge statistical calculations SAS is much faster (in my awareness at least 5 fold). On the other hand SPSS has clear advantages as far as graphics and tables were concerned. The possibility of easy and extensive editing of graphics is also a big advantage of SPSS in opposite to SAS.Regarding statistical functions like for example linear regression analyses or survival analyses it depends on the kind of analyses you like to perform. In general my opinion is, that SAS has more options and possibilities. Kind regards, Bernd Röhrig Dr. Bernd Röhrig Klinik für Innere Medizin/Poliklinik Projekt Geriatrische Onkologie Erlanger Allee 101 D-07740 Jena Tel.: 03641/9324255 E-Mail: Bernd.Roehrig@med.uni-jena.de

Actually the learning curve for SAS is considered much less steep than other languages, such as Java, C++.. With experiences on both packages, I'd say SAS and SPSS have almost identical learning curve, if you're talking about
programming. But if you have been mainly using the GUI interface of SPSS, then I'd say the learning curve for SAS is a little steeper, since most SAS jobs are done by hard coding