Unlike Microsoft, GraphPad has had the common sense not to make the new file format. Output the final product the way you wantĪnother new feature in Prism 5, one that everyone seems to be doing now, is the inclusion of a new file format that makes use of XML. With this newest version, your graphs will also appear in QuickLook (assuming you're using Leopard), which in practice is a brilliant way to dig through folders of files and pick the ones you want. It sounds like a minor point, but If you've got 20 or 30 seemingly identical-looking files, a few keywords and Spotlight make it child's play to find the one you want. The Info section allows you to enter notes on your data: who you are, what the experiments in that file consist of, the date, and so on. That sounds like a small thing, but you'd be surprised at the number of researchers I've come across who have no idea when or why to use an ANOVA over a t test, and it's something that often catches people out when it comes to peer review.
The software also comes with a statistics guide written by Prism's creator, and I've found this guide to be invaluable when it comes to determining exactly which stats test I ought to be using. The results from these analyses appear in the Results section, and it's here where you find out if that experiment you've been slaving over for the past few weeks actually worked, or if your P value is greater than 0.05 and it's time to go back to the drawing board. You can perform a range of analyses on your data, from simple transformations (X=LogX, X=K*X and so on) on to more complex statistical analyses ranging from column stats through t tests, ANOVAs, and on to linear and nonlinear regressions, correlations and survival curves. But the real power comes with the Analyze button. Like Excel or Numbers, you can manipulate this data by transposing rows and columns, inserting missing values, excluding individual cells and so on. I'm here to tell you it's been worth the wait. Now the software is at version 5, following a comprehensive rewrite in Cocoa, and is now a universal binary. Shortly afterwards, I made the switch to a Mac, safe in the knowledge that there was a Macintosh version-Prism and I have been good friends ever since.
Instead of spending hours calculating a test, you could select the data, choose your parameters, click a button, and voila! GraphPad was founded by Harvey Motulsky, a researcher who was looking to analyze his own data, and I think I speak for most of my peers when I say thank goodness he did!Īll those years ago, that first introduction to Prism 3 was on a Windows machine.
Instead, I was introduced to a software program by the name of GraphPad Prism that not only produced great-looking graphs, but also incorporated a statistics package that was both powerful and, more importantly for me, easy to use. Luckily for me, I started my career in science in the 1990s, so things like logarithmic graph paper and slide rules were only mentioned by old-timers at the pub. If you wanted to graph something, you needed a ruler, a sharp pencil, and some Letraset for the labels, and that's without touching on having to use log scales and drawing curves by hand. There was no PubMed, and definitely no Papers, so searching the literature involved hours spent at a desk in the library poring over Index Medicus. Of course, back in those days, everything was harder. But in a perfect example of letting the silicon chip do the heavy lifting, programs were written that would calculate those for you.
Back before the widespread use of computers in research, it was tough luck-you had better know how to calculate t tests or regressions. And just about anyone who has taken a stats course at university can tell you that calculating statistical significance is both hard and boring. Just about anyone who works in science knows that you can have all the data you like, but if you can't show statistically significant differences between groups, you haven't shown anything.