E-views or Excel?

[kretzy]

For one of my subjects at Uni (economics), it's recommended that we use a program that comes with our textbooks called E-Views. It only runs on windows but I've installed it with VPC and it seems to run ok. By that I mean it opens pretty quickly. I don't have any idea how to use it so I can't really test if it will be a viable option or not.

Our lecturer said the work can also be done on Excel, it's just that E-views is becoming an industry standard. Does anyone have any experience with this software? I'm just trying to get an idea of what my best options are.

Thanks

 

[clayj]

E-views is becoming an industry standard.

Hmm. E-views (which I assume is a spreadsheet program?) may be becoming an industry standard (even though I've never heard of it), but Excel is THE standard for spreadsheets... so much so that they've pretty much stopped adding new features to it and just started concentrating on making it much easier to use.

I used to support Excel for a living, and I can safely tell you that mastering Excel will let you accomplish all sorts of things. It's like having an infinite number of Legos to play with.

 

[savar]

For one of my subjects at Uni (economics), it's recommended that we use a program that comes with our textbooks called E-Views. It only runs on windows but I've installed it with VPC and it seems to run ok. By that I mean it opens pretty quickly. I don't have any idea how to use it so I can't really test if it will be a viable option or not.

Our lecturer said the work can also be done on Excel, it's just that E-views is becoming an industry standard. Does anyone have any experience with this software? I'm just trying to get an idea of what my best options are.

Thanks

Whoa, EViews and Excel are nothing alike. If you can get by with Excel then get by, but if EViews works and you got it for free why not use it? Its a really expensive program. If you learn to use it its a nice thing to put on your resume if you do anything with statistics.

 

[kretzy]

Whoa, EViews and Excel are nothing alike. If you can get by with Excel then get by, but if EViews works and you got it for free why not use it? Its a really expensive program. If you learn to use it its a nice thing to put on your resume if you do anything with statistics.

Cool, that's good to know. It's just that before I started the subject, I'd never heard of it before. The Uni organised for us to get a copy of it with our textbook, so that was good considering it cost around $1000.

I have a feeling the stuff we're going to be doing is going to be pretty basic to start off with hence being able to use Excel.

Thanks for the comments!

 

[theBB]

... so much so that they've pretty much stopped adding new features to it and just started concentrating on making it much easier to use.

And yet, I still cannot get it to put grid lines along x-axis when I plot something. Filtering and plotting subsets of a matrix of data is even less intuitive. I'd say they stopped adding features to it, because MS doesn't have a competitor in this field. Powerful, yes; easy to use, not at all (beyond the simple stuff)...

 

[MisterMe]

And yet, I still cannot get it to put grid lines along x-axis when I plot something. Filtering and plotting subsets of a matrix of data is even less intuitive. I'd say they stopped adding features to it, because MS doesn't have a competitor in this field. Powerful, yes; easy to use, not at all (beyond the simple stuff)...

Excel may be a decent spreadsheet, but sucks bigtime as a graphing/charting app. Historically, DeltaGraph has been considered to be the app for graphing Excel data. If you are serious about the quality of your graphs, you should look into it or the competition.

 

[giolouk]

thx