FAQs

R-Instat is free, menu driven statistics software powered by R. It is designed to exploit the power of the R statistical system, while simultaneously being as easy to use as other traditional point and click statistics software, through its menu and dialog-based interface.

The inspiration of R-Instat came from the original Instat software, a general statistical software. It was simple enough to be useful in the teaching of statistics and to assist research in any discipline that requires the statistical analysis of data. Instat was used by many people who had not used a statistics package before, and it was designed to encourage good statistical practice.

R-Instat aims to follow many of the same principles: simple to use in teaching and as a first statistics package, able to support researchers in analysing data, encouraging good statistical practice and free.

R-Instat is powered by the R statistical system. It makes use of the powerful features of the R language for working with data and takes advantage of the many excellent extensions to R made through contributor libraries (packages). For example, the graphics in R use the powerful ggplot2 package, which is an implementation of the grammar of graphics. R-Instat is a menu-driven software, hence no knowledge of the R programming language or scripting is required.

R-Instat is a free and open-source software.

R-Instat is a separate software application from R and RStudio. 

R-Instat includes a version of R within the software and uses this for all of R-Instat’s data processing. In this sense, you can think of R-Instat as a “front-end menu system” for R. It provides access to the powerful tools in R without the need to write the codes or scripts yourself. R-Instat does this for you as you use the dialogs and displays outputs in the output window. You can see the R commands used by R-Instat in the output window when you run any dialog command.

RStudio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for R. This means it supports you to use the R language. RStudio helps you write and manage R scripts, manage your R environment, display outputs and many more things related to the R language. If you want to use the R language directly, we recommend you use RStudio. If you’re not ready to use R directly, or you are not interested in learning the R language and just want to analyse your data, you may find R-Instat is a useful tool for you.