My review on JMP - take the time to learn and you will see the difference.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I use JMP Statistical Discovery Software from SAS to analyze and trend production data, looking for process deviations. I also use JMP Statistical Discovery Software from SAS to tabulate large datasets to understand how to pareto issues and address problems. I have used the Design of Experiments function to determine primary factors in an experiment. Finally, I used JSL to automate some tasks with large tables that needed to be merged and reorganized (split, perform a function, stack based on new column), etc.
Pros
- Handles large data sets
- Creates the script for a graph or table, allowing you to replicate the analysis when new data is added
- Provides great flexibility using the graph builder tool
Cons
- Errors in formulas are rarely diagnosed with much detail
- Some preferences are hard to find (are they in the platform settings or in the drop down red arrow context menus)
Likelihood to Recommend
JMP Statistical Discovery Software from SAS deals with data much better than Excel (which is the default). Recoding data is better, merging data is easier, importing multiple files into one merged file is great, and the tabulate function is one of my favorites (much more robust than a pivot table with a cleaner output). I think Excel is a little easier to learn and better for quick analysis of a small data set where you kind of already know the answer and only need the result.
