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R 3.0.0 Released
DaBombDotCom writes "R, a popular software environment for statistical computing and graphics, version 3.0.0 codename "Masked Marvel" was released. From the announcement: 'Major R releases have not previously marked great landslides in terms of new features. Rather, they represent that the codebase has developed to a new level of maturity. This is not going to be an exception to the rule. Version 3.0.0, as of this writing, contains only [one] really major new feature: The inclusion of long vectors (containing more than 2^31-1 elements!). More changes are likely to make it into the final release, but the main reason for having it as a new major release is that R over the last 8.5 years has reached a new level: we now have 64 bit support on all platforms, support for parallel processing, the Matrix package, and much more.'"
The best-known one is called 'R commander' (package name = Rcmdr ). It gives you a point-and-click interface and (like SPSS) drops the R code to repeat what you did using the menu (so that your work is reproducable).
Functionality includes: data summaries, contingency tables, means tests, proportions tests, variance tests, ANOVA, cluster analysis, model fitting (linear, generalised linear, logit), various graphs, tests for comparison between fitted models, plus draws and lookup tables for lots of continuous and discrete distributions. Rcmdr allows for plugins, and a number of them are also downloadable as R packages (e.g. experimental design).
The second one I know about is called 'Deducer' (package name Deducer), which provides a GUI loosely resembling that of SPSS.
Both GUIs are workable and allow you to do simple things simply.
There's also a rather nice IDE, called RStudio (which is a separate download).