A Program for Statistical Analysis and Matrix Algebra

MacAnova is a free, open source, interactive statistical analysis program for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux written by Gary W. Oehlert and Christopher Bingham, both of the School of Statistics, University of Minnesota.

In spite of its name, MacAnova is not just for Macintosh computers and not just for doing Analysis of Variance.

MacAnova has many capabilities but its strengths are analysis of variance and related models, matrix algebra, time series analysis (time and frequency domain), and (to a lesser extent) uni- and multi-variate exploratory statistics. The current version is 5.05 release 1.

Core MacAnova has a functional/command oriented interface, but an increasing number of capabilities are available through a menu/dialog/mouse type interface. Although the language and syntax are S-like (for those of you familiar with S, S-Plus or R), MacAnova is not S or R.

There is extensive documentation for MacAnova available from these Web pages. A recent addition is a HTML version of the information in all help files.

Pros and Cons of MacAnova

We like MacAnova because:

1. It's free, we can give it to students to use at home or their labs on Windows, Macintosh or Linux computers.
2. It's reasonably small yet still does what we need it to do. We use it extensively in course work, but also more broadly in applied statistics and research computing.
3. It's extensible via macros.
4. It's reasonably fast.
5. Students can get up and running for simple things with only a few commands.
6. It works well with libraries of named data sets and macros.
7. It is flexible enough and powerful enough to use for research level statistical computing
8. The windowed versions provide easy importing and exporting of data and results via special variable CLIPBOARD so users can enter data in a spreadsheet and do the analysis in MacAnova.

The most frequent complaints about MacAnova:

1. It's not (choose one of SAS, SPSS, SYSTAT, MINITAB, DATADESK, JMP, ... ) or some other widely used commercial program.
2. Even the Windows and Macintosh versions are not really menu driven and thus, to steal a phrase, MacAnova may be said to be user-polite, though perhaps not user-friendly.