Software Reviews : Statpacgold Publisher: Walonick Associates,6500 Nicollet Avenue South,Minneapolis,MN 55423 (telephone: [phone] or 612-866-9022) Year of Publication: 1987 Materials: Five unprotected program disks,a sample data disk,a 500-page manual in a three-ring binder Price: $595 base price plus $195 for forecasting module Educational licensing is $595 plus $200 per year,which includes updates and gives the buyer the right to make unlimited copies of the manual and to buy faculty copies at $100 and student copies (disks only) at $20. Full site licensing for a one-time fee of $5,000,including updates,gives the buyer the unrestricted right to make copies of the manual and disks. Availability: IBM PC and compatibles System Requirements: 192K,hard disk with one megabyte free space;graphics adapter and Epson-compatible graphics printer required for graphics options Effectiveness: Excellent User-Friendliness: Excellent Documentation: Excellent

Abstract

STATPAC GOLD is a first-rate major statistical package in the same category as SYSTAT; both should be considered more price-effective competitors to SPSS/PC and SAS/PC. The new GOLD version (2.0) includes extensive forecasting procedures as well as descriptive statistics, crosstabs, ANOVA, multiple regression , probit, factor analysis, and graphics. Allowing up to 32,767 records of up to 500 variables each, it is one of the few microcomputer statistical packages that can handle large survey datasets, including multiple responses and computation of the sample size needed. It imports and exports standard ASCII files (fixed or comma-delimited) or DIF data interchange files and thus can interface easily with mainframe, Lotus, and dBASE data. In fact, all codebook, data, and command files are always in word processable ASCII format. This package stands out from the rest and deserves to be considered carefully. An evaluation copy is available for $50.