An Introduction to MacAnova is Technical Report 600 (revised July 2001) from the School of Statistics, University of Minnesota. In about 67 pages, it provides the basics to get you up an running, although length limitations mean many details and descriptions of advanced features are left out. The Introduction is somewhat out of date (at level of Release 2 of MacAnova 4.12) but all the basic information is still correct.

The Introduction is included in the standard installation for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. For Windows and Linux, the documentation is in the SharedSupport/docs subdirectory of whereever you installed MacAnova. For Mac OS X, the documentation is in the docs folder on the installer disk image.

With many examples which you are encouraged to duplicate on your own computer, the Introduction shows you how to start and quit MacAnova, enter data, use it as a symbolic calculator and draw graphs and compute summary statistics from data. It also shows how to import data from and export data to a spreadsheet, has many examples of the use of help() and usage() and examples of some common statistical computations such as t-tests, ANOVA and regression analysis.

Several examples in An Introduction to MacAnova use the following sample data files.

• crops.txt
• crops1.txt
• macanova.dat
• mont5-1.txt
• Mont5-1.xls (Excel 4.0 file)
• rabbit.txt
• rabbit1.txt
• rabbit2.txt

For convenience these have been bundled into archive files:

• PrmrData.sea.Hqx for Macintosh (Binhex)
• prmrdata.zip for Windows/DOS (ZIP)
• prmrdata.tar for Unix/Linux (tar)