a brief note to my friends who use spss

If you are only generating cross-tabs and frequency distributions, fine. Or simple graphs and you don't especially want to invest any time in having them look nice. Otherwise, stop. You know the phrase "friends don't let friends drive drunk"? Well, it's not like we're at some party where I can take away your SPSS keys and call you a Stata cab. But if we were, I would. In any case, the important point is not that you should be using Stata. If you can figure out R, that's at least as good. And SAS is fine enough. I like Stata because it makes doing data analysis like playing one of those all-text adventure games from the 80s. But that's not the point. The point is that SPSS is toxic. It's like it is designed to encourage people to make mistakes and forever do their work in wildly inefficient ways. It's the intellectual equivalent of a car that was built with some kind of funhouse-optical-illusion-trick-glass for the windshield. Stop, now.

As a separate and more advanced matter, regardless of the statistical package you are using, if the process of writing a quantitative paper for you involves looking at printed output and retyping numbers from that output into a table (or paying someone to retype the numbers for you), you should really get away from that. It's much better to take the extra time to figure out a way to get your stats package to present the numbers in a way that makes them easy to paste into a table. You may have to put the little stars for statistical significance in by hand, but that should be it.

You know I only say this because I love you.

Update: This video contains an interview with one of the originators of SPSS, which he starts to talk about around 3 minutes into it.