MacAnova

MacAnova is an open-source, interactive statistical analysis program for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. MacAnova is written and developed by two statisticians, Gary W. Oehlert and Christopher Bingham, both of the School of Statistics, University of Minnesota. In contrast to its name, MacAnova is not just designed for Macintosh computers and also not made for doing Analysis of Variance only.

MacAnova contains several capabilities though it is most proficient in analysis of variance and related models, matrix algebra, time series analysis (time and frequency domain), and to a lesser extent uni-variate and multi-variate exploratory statistics. It is reasonably fast and is extensible through macros. It supports direct importing of data from spreadsheets using and exporting of data and results to other programs using the clipboard.

Core MacAnova has a functional or command-oriented user interface, but it also delivers a couple of other capabilities through a menu/dialog/mouse type interface. On the surface, MacAnova appears to be quite similar to statistics program S and its successor S-Plus, a similarity which makes it quite easy to translate S-Plus and R code to MacAnova. However, it features several differences from S-Plus and R code.

Again, it works well with libraries of named data sets and macros. Though MacAnova is not a comprehensive package, it is flexible and powerful enough to use for research level statistical computing, and it can also be used extensively in course work.

Students can use MacAnova to get up and running, solving statistical and algebra with only a few commands. MacAnova-related documentation is available on the University’s website including various releases of the program. It provides online usage summaries and complete help for over 550 topics in 8 automatically searched files.