Data Desk

If you haven't used it, Data Desk is an awesome statistical program. It's very simple and rather limited (it doesn't do logit or probit, for example), but there are few better ways to simply play with a dataset. It's very easy to visualize data and to drag variables in and out of equations. I recommend it highly.

At any rate, I bought a copy of Data Desk 6.0 my first year in grad school (ten years ago). Pretty much since that time, they've been promising to put out version 7.0. I figured maybe they'd add some nonlinear regression methods or something. Well, according to the latest press release, here are the new features in version 7.0:

• Vertical icon windows that can be resized so that icon names are completely visible
• Dynamic attachment to external OLE DB and ODBC-compliant datafiles (Windows only)
• A web query tool that allows you to search for meta data on the web
• Wizards that offer assistance with menu commands
• More control over the look of plots, tables, and the desktop
• The ability to export plots as PNGs and tables as HTML
• Many new plots and statistical tools
• New functionality to existing commands

Ten years for that? Come on.