Latest Stat And Math Software Taps Windows For Ease of Use

Recent advances in mathematical and statistical software have little to do with math or stat and a lot to do with Microsoft's Windows user interface. Ease of use is what people have always wanted from these packages, and ease of use is what they are finally getting, thanks to the nearly wholesale adoption of Windows by software developers. "We are trying to make a statistics program that everyone can use, and Windows, in particular, is helping us do that," says Paul Portrey, assistant manager of technical support at Stat-Soft Inc. in Tulsa, Okla. "If developers take advantage of the features of Windows, they can make a package that's very easy to work with." Windows is not an operating system but an add-on to the DOS operating system that drives IBM and compatible PCs. With Windows, these computers take on a more graphical look, similar to that of the Apple Macintosh computer. Upgrading a PC to Windows involves buying the Windows software; for most people, it also means adding more memory to the computer. Math and stat software for Windows made its appearance a few years ago, soon after the release of Windows itself in 1990. However, most early releases didn't take much advantage of Windows. In fact, they looked and functioned like the vendor's old DOS software. That has changed. Most current versions of stat and math software now incorporate the graphical user interface of Windows, and support most of its advanced functions, as well. For scientists, there are definite benefits to upgrading to Windows and taking advantage of these new releases. They are easier to operate in every way, from importing data to producing publication-quality output. "When I show people this software [Statistica/Windows from Stat-Soft], their eyes get huge," says Tim Denton, associate cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "Most of these programs have been extremely difficult to use, but I can download some data into Statistica, click on a button--for logistic regression, for instance--then enter a few settings, and off it goes. And I have never looked at the documentation--never." Like so many things in life, however, there is another side to this coin. While software users may see Windows as a positive development that brings easy-to-use programs in its wake, software developers see it as an enormous challenge. They have become so busy just keeping up with Microsoft and scrambling to support each new wrinkle of Windows that there's hardly time left for development of richer stat and math functionality. It's difficult to predict how this situation will affect scientists in the long run, so it's probably best at this time to appreciate the good side of Windows--stat and math software that's actually easy to use. Until recently, most statistical and mathematical programs would have taken top honors in any competition for user-unfriendly software. Statistics and mathematics by nature are complicated endeavors, and these programs tended to be large and intimidating. Their documentation hogged a good portion of a bookshelf. How the user was required to interact with the software also contributed to its unfriendliness. Giving a command involved typing long, nonintuitive strings of keystrokes, programming knowledge was often required, and getting data into and out of the program was time-consuming and inefficient. "The old way it was done with SAS- and SPSS [Statistical for Social Sciences]-type programs was that you typed out commands and worked with lists of data," says Portrey of Stat-Soft. "You had to learn a programming language such as the classic SAS or some other programming language to use those packages," adds Denton. STATISTICAL AND MATHEMATICAL SOFTWARE SUPPLIERS Abacus Concepts, Berkeley,CA Advanced Graphics Software Inc., Carlsbad, CA Beckman Instruments Inc., Fullerton, CA Bimillennium, Los Gatos, CA BioSoft, Ferguson, MO Brendan Scientific, Grosse Pointe, MI DataTranslation, Marlboro, MA DeltaGraph, Monterey, CA DSP Development Corp., Cambridge, MA Galactic Industries Corp., Salem, NH GraphPad, San Diego, CA Hanson Research Corp., San Jose, CA Horstmann Software, San Jose, CA Intelligenetics Inc., Mountain View, CA Jandel Scientific, San Raphael, CA Logical Devices, Deerfield Beach, FL Manugistics Inc., Rockville, MD MathSoft, Cambridge, MA The Math Works, Natick, MA 01760 MicroCal Software Inc., Cambridge, MA 01060 Molecular Devices Corp., Sunnyvale, CA National Instruments, Austin, TX Perkin-Elmer Corp., Applied Biosystems Div. Norwalk, CT Scanalytics, Billercia, MA Scientech Inc., Boulder, CO 80303 Softshell, Grand Junction, CO Soft Warehouse, Honolului, HI Stat-Ease Inc., Minneapolis, MN Statistical Programs, Houston, TX Statistical Science, Seattle, WA Stat-Soft Inc., Tulsa, OK Strawberry Tree, Sunnyvale, CA Synergy Software, Reading, PA TransNetCorp., Somerville, NJ TriMetrix Inc., Seattle, WA Tripos, St. Louis, MO Visual Numerics, Houston, TX Waterloo Maple Software, Ontario, Canada With Windows, the way a user interacts with software--any software--has changed dramatically. Long strings of perfectly typed, arcane commands have been replaced by the simple action of pointing at an object on the screen and clicking the mouse. Elizabeth Nugent, director of product marketing at MathSoft Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., offers a comparison between the older DOS-based version of her company's Mathcad software and the newer Windows version: "To enter a symbol such as an integral sign in the DOS version, users had to memorize a series of keystrokes or look them up from a reference card kept nearby. With the Windows version, they just go to the palette on the screen and click on whatever symbol they want." Another benefit of Windows is that it has forced software developers to follow certain conventions in the way they design a user interface, so that all Windows-based programs now work similarly. The commands to print a file and save a file are at basically the same location in every package. Since users no longer waste time struggling to perform simple tasks, they can concentrate more on what they bought the software for in the first place--math or statistics. "Windows packages are becoming more alike, so once users learn one approach, they can apply it to other programs," says Portrey. "That's the real advantage I see for users. Once they get the hang of one program, they can use any other Windows program that comes along, as long as the developer has kept compatible with the standards of Windows." Ease of operation and cross-program compatibility are two of the obvious ways that Windows makes stat and math software more attractive. They free scientists from investing a great deal of time learning to operate a piece of software when what they really want to do is analyze data or solve equations. Windows-based programs let them do that very quickly. There are a number other capabilities built into Windows that developers have tapped to make their software easier to use. Some of these capabilities are obvious to researchers, while others work behind the scenes, with users rarely if ever aware of their presence. But these innovations go a long way toward easing the tedium formerly associated with analyzing data or solving mathematical equations. "The ability to exchange information with other programs is a big factor in making a statistics package easy to use," says C.P. Yang, president of MicroCal Software Inc. in Northhampton, Mass. "This can be done very easily between Windows-based packages." Thanks to Windows, the act of writing a report and leaving a big space in the text and then coming along later and manually taping in a graph is a thing of the past. Any graphics produced in a Windows-based stat or math package can be placed directly into a Windows-based word processor through the software's cut-and-paste function. Windows goes quite a bit further, however, in providing ways to transfer information between software packages. Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), for example, are features of Windows that developers can tap to permit their programs to exchange information with other programs in real time. Explains Portrey, "DDE, which we support and I assume most other applications support, also, allows you to do things like connect your spreadsheet work to your stat data block. The stat data block is automatically updated when the spreadsheet is updated. Or you can create a graph and cut and paste it to a word-processing document, then link it using DDE, so that any time you edit the graph in the stat software, the changes are automatically reflected in the word processor document." OLE takes information sharing between applications even further, so that not only data but also "objects"--which might represent an entire analysis routine, for example--can be shared between programs. Like DDE, this is something the developer must incorporate into the software; it doesn't come automatically with the Windows environment. According to Portrey, his company's Statistica/Windows supports most functions of OLE, with expanded support to come in the next release. "There are several components of OLE version 2 that only Microsoft products support right now," he says. One of the nicest features of Windows-based stat and math programs is how they simplify the process of getting data into the program in the first place. With these packages, it is no longer necessary to supply the computer with a list of data arranged in some rigid format. Most of the Windows-based packages can take data directly from a spreadsheet or database, and some of them have strong spreadsheet capabilities of their own. One stat package even has an intelligent data input function that can look at a string of numbers and figure out the format with no help from the user. "I haven't found anything that Statistica can't import," says Cedars-Sinai's Denton, who uses three or four databases as well as the Excel spreadsheet. However, Statistica is one of the programs that includes a spreadsheet editor of its own. "We think it is nicer for people to be able to do all their work in the stats program, rather than in a spreadsheet or database," says Portrey. "For our next release, we are trying to think of anything that Excel does that one would possibly want to do with stat data." "We support most of the standard spreadsheet packages," says MicroCal's Yang, who feels that compatibility with other programs is an important component of ease of use. But Origin, the company's stat package, also includes an intelligent ASCII import routine. "This routine imports almost any style of ASCII file with minimal input from the user," Yang says. "The ability to deal with an ASCII file is one of the things I needed in a stat package," declares Mark Wensnahan, a graduate student in the department of atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. "I'm reading satellite data off a CD and doing various things to it, then writing it out to the hard disk as an ASCII file. I import it to the Origin stat package from there. Origin will go through the format of the file I'm trying to import and more or less figure it out without any problem. Occasionally I'll either have to modify the file or tell the software a few more things about it, but it eventually figures it out on its own." No matter how well a stat or math program imports data, it eventually must manipulate the data in some way and then present it to the user in a form that makes sense. For most scientists, this means tables at the very least and preferably graphs. Most DOS-based packages can produce rudimentary graphs and plots, but Windows-based packages deliver publication-quality graphics. Now it is not necessary to do what many scientists have traditionally done--produce rough graphs with a stat package and then re-create them in other software designed specifically for graphics. As usual, Windows is at the base of this improvement, at least in part. Windows includes something called TrueType fonts. As long as the software developer designs the application to take advantage of the fonts, the quality of graphs is greatly improved because users can select from many type styles and sizes. "Our DOS software only supports the Courier font," explains Nugent of MathSoft. "Our Windows version supports the TrueType fonts so the output is much nicer." High-quality three-dimensional graphics are relatively new to stat and math packages, and many of the Windows-based packages support 3-D output. "This is almost a requirement now," says Yang. "Some people don't need 3-D, but most vendors are trying very hard to come up with it because that is what everybody expects." "Three-dimensional graphs remind me of the line from the movie [Field of Dreams]: 'If you build it, they will come,' " says Denton, the cardiologist. "If vendors add a tool to a package, it will get used. I'm interested in the assessment of quality of life, and when I plot quality-of-life measurements on a 3-D graph, I actually see some interesting outcomes that I wouldn't be able to see in 2-D. 3-D looks a little flashy, but there are times when it does add to your understanding." Windows has made such an improvement in stat and math software that developers see no turning back. Many have announced that they will no longer be upgrading the DOS versions of their programs. "To my understanding, all the major vendors have already moved their DOS packages to Windows, with the exception of one or two," says Yang. "And there are claims from some of our competitors that they are not going to support a DOS version any longer. All future versions will be for Windows." Indeed, the latest challenge for the software developers is to get their programs ready to support the upcoming release of Windows 4.0, also called Chicago. Microsoft is expected to release Chicago in the first quarter of 1995. "We are now developing a new version of Statistica that we have been working on for some time, and we'll release that in a few months," says Portrey. "But at the same time, we're already working toward the Chicago version of Windows that is coming." Does this focus on keeping up with Windows detract from other aspects of software development? "Like a lot of other companies, we're trying to keep up with Windows," says Mark Anderson, vice president and general manager of Minneapolis-based Stat-Ease Inc. "It requires a very intensive effort. A large amount of attention is being diverted from adding more [statistics] applications to adapting the interface to the standards set by Windows. For smaller software manufacturers like ourselves, it has a bigger impact, but for nearly everyone it is a consuming problem." Scientists needing to produce good-looking plots quickly will probably see Windows-based software as a godsend. For statisticians pushing the edge of their field and hoping to see new releases incorporating Bayesian statistics or neural networks, the current focus on Windows may turn out to be a hindrance, at least temporarily. This is because development efforts are currently directed at Windows-based presentation rather than the math or stat applications themselves. But there is no question that Windows-based stat and math software is easier to use than its predecessors, and for many scientists, that's reason enough to love it. Caren D. Potter is a freelance science writer based in McKinleyville, Calif.

Latest Stat And Math Software Taps Windows For Ease of Use

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of