Wizard - Statistics & Analysis App Reviews

An exceptional analysis tool that gets you up and running quickly. No need to remember all the complex statistical formulas and functions. Just pivot, filter, model, graph and go. One caution. Wizard won’t make sense of nonsense. Your data must be in proper format and relevant to the analysis you want to perform. I imported a dataset to Wizard that I struggled with for a week with Excel using pivot tables, conditional formating and functions. Within minutes I had my answers. And, the presentation of the result was like artwork. Nice job. I may not delete Excel, Matlab, R-Studio and Python from my computer but they will be used a lot less intensely now that I have Wizard.

The title of this review says it all. After discovering who the author was by reading a blog post of his related to the Julia programming language I found this piece of software. I tried the trial and watched the video. Both are very good at getting a new user up to speed quickly. Why did I buy this software? I am a programmer myself and am currently in the process of building/engineering a complicated pricing model. Ive used a number of methods to analyze a gigantic set of CSV files full of messy data, but Wizard is the only one that could handle my datasets without feeling sluggish. For instance, 200MB of CSV is a joke to Wizard. I attempted to use Google Refine and it couldnt even handle 16MB without giving it more RAM. Its clear the author has done a ton of work optimizing performance. Investigating different columns/rows/etc. is practically instant. Normally when I see performance optimization, I see bad UIs. I am extremely happy with the UI in Wizard. Wizards UI makes doing statistical analysis, even for people without a background in statistics, like playing with legos. Within about 30min of playing with Wizard I had taken a giant set of historical data, created a model, and saw that the predictions Wizard was giving were spot on. Its a little early to tell if the model Ive created is correct, but right now it looks close, and if thats the case, Wizard just saved me and my team about a week of work. Fantastic job Evan. Keep up the fantastic work.

I’ve enjoyed using this app for a while to idly munge through data - I generally use “R” for heavy lifting and Excel for data storage and general “light statistics” use. This falls perfectly in the middle and is MUCH more attarctive than either of the above (although R produces some pretty good graphics if you are prepared to put the time into it) However, I just got the bext customer support ever - way back in 2012 I asked about date support. Today, I received an email out of the blue from the author, Evan Miller, letting me know (if I didm’t know already) that date formats MM/DD/YY, MM/DD/YYYY and YYYY-MM-DD were now supported. Pretty cool. Evan has been steadily tweaking Wizard and the new versions always have some nice new features. I typically drop our medical office financials into Wizard to see how we are doing for different operations that we perform. This has somewhat replaced a large and rather ugly filemaker database. This probably isn’t the best use for quite a nice and powerful statistical package, but it’s much more pleasant than many of the alternatives.

Very responsive support from the developer. I had some questions relating to a course I was doing on Udacity. The developer helped me construct a simple model and I’m hooked on the ease of use of this software. Still learning the features as I explore different data sets but expect to use the learning and insights gained to recover my investment in very short time.

I have used this software for over 3 months and am blown away by the intuitive design and relative power of this application. If you need something that is easier to use and more powerful than Excel, but less cumbersome and expensive than full-blown stats programs like SPSS, this app may work for you. I use it primarily to do quick analysis of large patient data sets (eg. visits, insurance status, diagnoses etc) and it saves so much time and energy compared to having to create pivot tables and calculations in Excel. Getting quick access to statistical significance is also a plus. There have also been several updates in the short time I have had the software so it seems as if the developers are constantly working on it. Definitely worth every penny.

(my unedited copy includes “by resentfuls unable to use” I have no idea where this came from or how to eliminate it. Editor, please delete) GREAT PRODUCT! I’m a long time education professor who has published over 60 studies in refereed journals. I routinely used SPSS since 1974, from version 1.0 in mimeograph and punched card form. Wizard statistics does so much of my current work. The one-time price is right (a bargain)! I’ve tried other stat programs—none come close. I don’t know why someone else has not provided this mid-level package for so many of us! (SPSS, Systat etc. cost thousands of dollars for annual licenses). The author is working hard on updates, improvements, and bug elimination—although I HAVE HAD ZERO PROBLEMS WITH MY USE! ((my only hope is that the author is working on test statistics—alpha, item analysis, factor analysis for paper-pencil tests, teacher made examinations))

I really love this app. It makes basic statistical analysis a breeze, performing most of the proper tests before you even ask for them.

May not be the most powerful statistical software, but excellent for the price and able to do nearly everything I want for the projects related to my work. Simple to use.

I’m currently working on my master’s thesis and have never been a statistics guru, but need to provide statistical data regardless. I’ve used SAS, STATA, and SPSS in the past and all of them have a significant learning curve; SAS and STATA being the worse because you have to have a good understanding of statistics and programming language to generate even basic statistical data (e.g. standard deviation, mean, z-score, p-value). Wizard lacks the advanced statistical analysis capabilities of the others, but it more than makes up for it with its interface and visuals. I was able to get more statistical analysis done in a few hours with Wizard than with months of STATA due to the difference in user interface. The one upgrade I would like to see is the ability to export graphs and distribution curves to jpeg format. Wizard creates nice graphics, but you have to do a screen capture to use them in a Word/Pages document.

This app really does what apps are supposed to do - meet a need. In general, the Mac environment does not have a huge selection of statistical software. Wizard really makes up for that. The pivot section allows one to very quickly go through a large data set and derive the basic characteristics of the total group or any selected subset of the group. Its ease of use and facility in doing so is far advanced over any other software that I have used. It handles numeric, survival time, text and categorical variables easily. The summary section allows one to explore interrelationships among variables in the dataset as well as statistically characterize each variable. Finally the modeling section allows one to determine the predictive power of sets of variables. While most programs allow one to run a particular statistical test on selected variables, Wizard allows one to truly explore a dataset in an almost infinite fashion. For people working with evolving data such as that from a clinical trial, it is an indispensible tool for stepwise evaluation of variables. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. The modules are well designed and convey complex information clearly. The software is robust and stable. Findings gleaned from the analysis can be output in a variety of ways for incorporation into other documents such as spreadsheets, presentations and text files. Data can be input from a number of common sources such as spreadsheets, and with Wizard Pro from more complex databases such as SSPN. If you are working with data you should have Wizard!

Bought this to do some data modelling at work. Ran into a problem with imports and contacted the support group. Within an hour the developer had contacted me and provided a fix. The application does exactly what it claims and the support is first rate.

It’s kind of geeky to say it, but I just love Wizard. It makes visualizing data correlations a snap, faster than anything I’ve used and very intuitive. The developer is great. Updates arrive frequently, and the program just gets better and better.

I’ve been an occasional user for a couple years now and this app definitely keeps getting better. I mainly use it to visualize and otherwise wrangle with more data than Excel can deal with at a time. The user interface has aged a bit but it is still significantly better than anything comparable out there. Visualizations in the summary view make exploring relationships between variables very simple and enjoyable. Even with my occasional use, I’d say this app has paid itself off in time saved many times over, not to mention the fact that I now positively look forward to making sense of large amounts data instead of dreading working with Excel. My number one wish would be to see string/column transformations such as split and Regex match/extract. A close second is the ability to actually transpose column values into new columns with the pivot table, similar to what Excel allows. Last, even though stability has improved by leaps and bounds compared to the earlier versions, I still see the occasional crash in this app; support for autosave and document versions would be both convenient and a firewall against these problems.

This software makes quick work out of big sets of data. As a result, I’ve cranked out a few analyses that have had big impact. I’m also a huge fan of the “bottom line,” as it can be a big help when folks are looking at your analysis over your shoulder. I do have a feature suggestion though. In the dot plots (or scatterplot) tab, there is an option to toggle on the “best fit line”. It would be absolutely brilliant if it were an option to show the 95% confidence interval with the line. It’s a great way of intuitively visualizing whether or not there is a correlation in the data. I ask for this, as we all know, when data is not correlated, best-fit lines can be misleading (which is why in the program there is the option to toggle it off automatically if it’s not significant). Adding a fourth option to show a confidence interval would be a great addition, as it would allow one to show the best-fit without implying correlation to the untrained.

Wizard doesn’t do everything, but what it does, it does brilliantly. The Data Filtering features let me easily limit and expand the data set to find hidden relationships (e.g., data collected before 2013 is substantially different than the data collected after 2013; discovering that a highly accurate predictive model can be created if we exclude December sales data each year). Almost too easy to use — you can add and subtract data rows and variables so easily that you can be tempted to tweek your model to produce the results you hope for. It might be good for the software to warn users when they are building a model that is too complex for the amount of data they are analyzing. The trial version at the developer’s website is fully functional. Try it and see if Wizard has the statistical tests you need. For me it does extremely well and is a nice alternative to using StatPlus LE in Excel.

Active, responsive developer. Innovative, truly user friendly UI. Price is unbeatable. This is the one! If you doubt that, download the demo from the developer’s website. Seriously, though, you’re going to love it.

This app is generally excellent and it does pretty much everything I need it to do, but make sure you save regularly because it does crash periodically - although no more frequently than Microsoft Word, for example. Hopefully this general issue will be addressed over time.

Not quite as powerful as R, SPSS or SAS, but its up there. The real difference is a completely new level of usability. Its like going from FORTRAN to an iPhone. This is not just pretty graphics slapped on top of a mainframe program. Wizard is a complete reimagining of how sophisticated stats can be made simpler. I’m using this to quickly explore my data before building some statistical methods in Python. Wizard is hands-down, the simplest, most useful tool I’ve seen for this job.

I’ve just begun to learn the many features of Wizard, but am already impressed with the ease of use and quality of analyses. I teach a graduate research design course in which students are expected to consult a statistician as they develop and conduct a study, but Wizard would allow some to examine their data and draw conclusions. I plan to recommend Wizard to my students when the new semester begins in September so they can get hands-on-experience with the statistical tests we talk about. The program provides both parametric and nonparametric solutions, and multiple and logistic regession. It does not do item analysis, interrater reliability, or Cronbach’s alpha (at least that I can find). You don’t choose which test to run; the program chooses based on the level of data (a really good thing for students with limited statistical trainiing)— prespecified as numerical, categorical, or survival times. I haven’t been able to figure out how to get the program to provide effect sizes or confidence intervals yet, but I’m still learning. Wizard is already a great program, and the developer appears to be working on additional enhancements (according to the blog section). I’m extremely satisfied with my purchase.

It’s difficult not to gush about Wizard, but it has literally changed my life. Its beauty, simplicity and ease of use cannot be exaggerated. In literally minutes I was pivoting like a lunatic through basic and complex data sets, and after a day I cannot remember how it was that I survived without this pectacular piece of software. It is fairly priced, and the support is excellent.