Fellow researchers

[Mantis]

Fellow researchers,

I am currently writing my first medical paper on heart valve surgery. I used SPSS for my statistical analysis. However, the tables and graphs created by SPSS look atricious in my opinion. What software do you use to create visually pleasing graphs and tables for your papers?

Input would be greatly appreciated.

[marcb]

Matlab and then touch things up with corel draw

[Diakonov]

Matlab has been good to me.

[BC]

I use Excel.  I know it's not the best, and it takes a lot of time to make things look good, but it's just what I'm used to.

[The Atog Lord]

I use MYSQL to store the data, and Ruby to parse it.  For heavier statistics I, Prefer R. I generally use Numbers for graph creation.

[TheWhiteDragon]

I use MSPaint and Post-It Notes

[nataz]

STATA or minitab.

if you are looking to expand beyond paper (lecture/presentation) and have access to the web, check out tableau public (http://www.tableausoftware.com/). its a quick and easy way to make interactive charts and graphs and publish them to the web. I find it useful for all kinds of public presentation type stuff. 

[mdenny]

Some thoughts,
R is the most powerful statistics package available, its free and very customizable but it has an enormously steep learning curve. In terms of power and use-ability SAS with the enterprise guide installed produces really nice outputs in a relatively user-friendly environment. Stata will function similarly but I am not familiar with and GUI packages available for it as I have only used an older command line version. MINITAB is really user friendly like Excel but I wouldn't say the graphics it outputs are publication quality. To me, it seems that the first thing to do is see if your institution supports reduced price licenses for Stata or SAS and if they do, then get one of those (they are many thousands of dollars otherwise). If not then I would immagine you can probably become proficient in R in about 3-6 months so thats your next best bet. 

[Mantis]

Thanks a lot guys, useful stuff.

I am going to try the Matlab trial version and see how that goes.