Recommended Stata alternatives?

I suppose my question is: in the short term, what does R do for me that makes up for the extra learning effort? Nothing. Well, nothing + epsilon -- R will do some things that Stata won't, and R is good for simulation, if you care about that. But if you can't afford Stata, then the choice isn't between Stata and R, it's between R and other free stuff. I would be utterly astonished if you found a freeware workalike or work-similar to stata. No doubt there is other free stuff that will manipulate data and run regressions, but my sense is that it's generally either crippled in some way, user-hostile, or doesn't have a useful community around it. R isn't crippled -- if you can do it, you can do it with R -- and the community built up around it is very useful and keeps expanding its capabilities. If you have to learn anything about any other software other than Stata, it should be R, because what you learn won't be useless to you in a year.

And yeah, getting a csv out of stata is as easy as "outsheet using filename, comma". I just have no idea how to do that in SPSS or SAS, because I've developed a real loathing for them. SPSS I just never liked. And SAS pissed me off real bad in like 1995 when I found that while every version of SAS uses the same godawful syntax from 1787 or whenever it first came out, you couldn't transparently move a SAS-for-unix dataset to SAS-for-PCs, even with the same version number. Fuck you, SAS.

R will http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-data.html#EpiInfo-Minitab-SAS-S_002dPLUS-SPSS-Stata-Systat. I can't say that it is especially easy to use at first, but there are numerous GUIs for it, Linux and Windows.

http://www.r-project.org/ can read Stata datasets, and there's a windows version. Do you need to run Stata scripts too?

No, I don't think I need Stata scripts. Some kind of logging would be nice though. One thing I should have emphasised is that the datasets I'm using are very large (650Mb or more). I need to be able to open these files and do things like generating new variables based on existing data, but I'm only going to be running regressions on about a dozen variables (out of well over a thousand), so I'll probably want to extract the desired variables into a new, smaller dataset.

I'm not sure what kind of logging Stata does, but R automatically saves all the commands you run to a history file. This is invaluable to me when I come back several months later and can't figure out just how I created that particular plot.

Not free, but if your university is a participant in stata's gradplan a permanent license for intercooled ("normal") Stata 10 is only $155. And then you have Stata 10.x forever and can throw it on your laptop, etc. If it's got to be free, R. R is not user friendly. At best, it vaguely tolerates users with a grumpy sniff. In your shoes, I would load all of the datasets I think I'm going to use and dump them to csv from their home software rather than screw around with beating R into importing proprietary datasets. Learning the other parts of R will be enough of a pain in the ass, and it should be easy to make Stata/SPSS/SAS vomit a csv.

The ?lm above gets the help for lm. If you want an R book I highly recommend An Introduction to S and S-Plus by Phil Spector, which works just fine for R. Unfortunately the online introductions I have seen all suck, as do several of the books with R in their name.

ROU_Xenophobe: Unfortunately, it has to be free. No GradPlan, so the cheapest Stata is £320. I'll definitely follow the CSV suggestion, thanks. Many thanks for the R code, grouse. As you and ROU say, R is not particularly easy to use. I can see that if the choice was between Stata and R, perhaps the effort of learning R would pay off in the long run. But I've already chosen Stata, and I'm looking for a temporary substitute for it rather than a fullblown long-term replacement. With that in mind, I suppose my question is: in the short term, what does R do for me that makes up for the extra learning effort?