I recently was talking with a good friend and brilliant researcher regarding the advantages of R. As you can guess, I was the advocate. Coming from psychology, we are mainly taught to use “simple” analysis tools, and mainly SPSS. I never liked SPSS, even as a student. not knowing of any possible alternatives or what could be improved, I just thought the whole thing felt too black-boxy. But it is a convenient tool, when the data is already in a relatively clean format, and the analyses you want to do are straight forward, and you don’t mind not knowing exactly the formula SPSS uses to calculate your results.