Most feature rich spreadsheet/graph application

[Warpnow]

So, I'm an Economics major. It seems half of my assignments include graphs, and almost all of them use excel. Excel is considered the low end of the windows spectrum of software. Most of the graduate level students use a program called Stata(sp?) or SAS.

Does anyone know what the most feature rich spreadsheet application is, especially in regards to generating graphs from data?

[JDShu]

For school, I would recommend using the tools that your courses suggest (Excel?) I remember doing a course where certain plugins in excel were specifically needed. Programs like SAS /Stata/SPSS I suspect your university will have installed on their computers, so use those. I've heard that you can ssh into Stata but I've never tried that.

As for something on Ubuntu, you have good old Open Office Spreadsheet

[Tibuda]

I just graduated in economics last month.

I have used Stata and SPSS for some time, but R (http://www.r-project.org/) is the best available statistical software. It is command-line and scripting only (there are some GUIs like RCommander), but when I used Stata I only used command-line and scripting anyway. It is open source and extensible. There are some "bleeding-edge" resources available, like Roger Bivand (http://www.nhh.no/Default.aspx?ID=697) contributions to the spatial dependency analysis package (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/spdep/index.html).

If you choose R, bookmark this site (http://www.statmethods.net/) (a very nice introduction tutorial) and read "Econometrics in R (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Farnsworth-EconometricsInR.pdf)" by Grant Farnsworth (covers all the basic stuff learned in econometrics courses).

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Gnumeric is another spreadsheet application similar to Excel/OpenOffice and is pretty good for graphing. If you're doing a lot of statistics then R is great, but is a command line application. You could also look at PSPP, a FOSS replacement for SPSS.