Having the right tools to quickly collect, analyze, and display data is essential. In this course, you utilized Excel for simple analysis and for displaying data graphically. However, you needed the more statistically oriented capabilities of SPSS in order to perform analysis of variance. These are both GUI based analysis tools. Other commonly used GUI based statistics tools include JMP and Minitab. In many situations, a code based environment is more useful than a GUI based environment. This is particularly true if wanting to automate statistical analysis. The programs SAS and R are common code based statistical utilities. It is also possible to combine the capabilities of SAS or of R with the GUI based tools giving an even more powerful analysis environment.

Choose one of the tools listed here that was not utilized in the course (SAS, R, JMP, or Minitab). Provide a brief description of this tool including its strengths and weaknesses. Describe a scenario where you would make use of this tool and explain why this tool would be preferred in that case.