Use a VB script that goes through our surveys and pulls out variable and value labels automatically, edit them and apply to SPSS dataset. 'automatic reporting' is a relative term. This is nicely done in the foreign package if you were to import a SPSS (or Stata) dataset, the resulting R data keeps the labeling information from the original. The Hmisc package has variable labels, but value labels is for factors. (or perhaps you were referring to some automatic reporting?). For small tables I usually just copy-paste the screen output in R directly into Excel, then call 'text-to-column', alternatively you might use write.csv (or csv2) on the table. If you are going to be learning R, this post on the stats exchange website has a bunch of great resources for learning R. If you have to collaborate with others, their comfort level with SPSS or R should play a factor as you don't want to be the only one in your group that can work on or edit a script that you wrote in the future. Others have pointed out some of the big differences in terms of cost and functionality of the programs. I haven't found a good SPSS community to ask questions of when I run into problems.
R syntax seems much more logical and follows programming standards more closely AND there is a very active community to rely on should you run into trouble (SO for instance). You mention that you are going to be scripting most of your work, and personally I find SPSS's scripting syntax absolutely horrendous, to the point that I've stopped working with SPSS whenever possible.I haven't found a robust solution for R to accomplish this same task. Labeling of data -> SPSS does a pretty good job with the variable labels and value labels.The equivalent function in R involves learning LaTex or using a odfWeave or Lyx or something of that nature. These can relatively easily be transported to Word Documents or Excel sheets for further analysis / presentation. Output of tables - SPSS has basic tables, general tables, custom tables, etc that are all output to that nifty data viewer or whatever they call it.Some of the biggest differences I have run into include: I work at a company that uses SPSS for the majority of our data analysis, and for a variety of reasons - I have started trying to use R for more and more of my own analysis. I will be mostly working with scripts in either case anyway so I wanted to know about the other differences. I am not asking which one is better, but just wanted to know what are the difference in terms of workflow between the two (besides the fact that SPSS has a GUI). Therefore, I was wondering what is the basic difference between these two softwares. I will also be generating quite a lot of graphs and charts. I have found that R and SPSS are among the most popular tools for statistical analysis. I will be analysing vast amount of network traffic related data shortly, and will pre-process the data in order to analyse it. Are different, depending on your operating system either Microsoft.
You can think of installing R as buying car and of installing R and RStudio as.
This tutorial covers the installation of R on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X.