Menus

File

The file menu contains what you would expect.
You can start with an empty file (spreadsheet), File > New or import one that already exists File > Open.
You can Export a data set, R objects, R work space and a graph as an image on the file menu.
You can save and close the data set you are working with. You can access the most recent data frames you opened from the file menu.
Finally you can exit R-Instat by clicking on Exit at the bottom of the menu.

Edit

The Edit menu basically lets you make changes on the data.
For now you can only copy data or select all, the others are not working yet.

Prepare

The prepare menu comes in handy when dealing with data preparation, under the menu we have a number of sub dialogues making the data ready for analysis.
The data frame sub dialog allows users to view data, renaming, sorting and filtering the already imported data.
Users are also able to convert variables into different forms. Reshaping,merging and appending data-sets is enhanced under this dialog

Describe

You can use the describe menu to summarise data,frequencies of different variables and produce graphs.
The specific sub dialog allows users to come up with scatter plots, line plots, histograms, boxplots, bar charts,rug plots and parallel coordinate plots.
The describe menu has the multivariate sub dialog that allows for multivariate analysis such as correlations, canonical relationships and principle component analysis.
Facilities for the powerful themes component of ggplot2 have also been implemented. This is still to be improved further as will other ggplot features, particularly for mapping and also adding to the list of available geoms.

Model

R is so powerful in fitting (statistical) models. Our challenge has been to make a subset of R-s modelling capabilities as easy as possible to use.

Special menus

You can choose (through the View menu) whether to make the special menus visible, or not.
There are currently four special menus in different stages of completeness.

• Climatic - for the analysis of historical climatic data

• Procurement - to evaluate procurement of goods and services, including identifying "red flags" that might indicate corruption.

• Options by Context - for agriculture, particularly for the analysis of on-farm studies

• Health and Survival - for the analysis of health data

Each of these menus is designed to make analyses even easier for staff who are working in these particular areas of application.

Each is ordered in the same way as the overall software, namely File, then Prepare, then Describe and then Model. The contents are a combination of useful dialogues from the standard parts of R-Instat, together with special dialogues that reflect the particular structure of the data from that area of application.

The view menu in its default form has the data view and output windows, the two tailor made menus of procurement and climatic are checked.
To view the other 4 windows, Log Window, Script Window, Column Metadata, Data Frame Metadata have to be checked by the users in case they are needed.

Tools

Help

The help menu assists users access to the Instat Guides and resources and ideas on the use of statistics to support statistics teaching and learning.