What is Minitab 10.51 Xtra?

As a company, Minitab is older than Apple or Microsoft. The name alludes to its popular minicomputer-based statistics programs, developed in the early 1970s. In fact, Minitab runs on several computers you can’t even buy anymore.

But unlike some Mac applications, Minitab hasn't always been helped by its venerable ancestry. Because it has traditionally held a large share of the university instructional market, Minitab has had little incentive to modernize, and for years its software lacked exploratory graphics features, advanced chart types (3-D surface and wire frame), and a macro language.

Minitab Release 10 Xtra fills out even the most demanding Minitab user’s wish list with admirable thoroughness. The graphics package, for example, is completely new, and offers not only the longhoped-for 3-D and exploratory graph types but a complete set of modern drawing and annotation tools (including graph "brushing" for highlighting selected sets of points). Minitab has always been a good choice for black-and-white scientific journal graphs; now it can do flashy, custom-color, dazzle-your-investors work too, complete with overlays and graphswithin-graphs.

Release 10 Xtra includes new features that should have been added years ago (x-y scatter plots with regression data, for example), and others that come as a pleasant surprise. Not only is Mini tab’s timeseries analysis as good as any stand-alone program’s, but 10 Xtra includes cluster analysis with appropriate graphing tools.

Minitab’s new release also puts it ahead of its competitors in the field of industrial statistics. The quality- and process-control menu in Release 10 Xtra has more tests and more control-chart types than other Mac statistics programs. Other general-purpose packages can’t compete with Minitab’s design-of-experiments facility, either in scope or in documentation. People have been using Minitab for decades to optimize manufacturing activities, and it shows.

Another important strength of this edition of Minitab is the combination of a simple, BASIC-like macro language with two large classes of math functions; matrix-manipulation functions and probability distributions... Not only can you program your own custom versions of standard tests, but you can develop whole new classes of tests, bridging the worlds of classical Fisher-type statistics and newer bootstrap/resampling methods — impressive for a program that’s compatible with dozens of college textbooks.

The only downside of this edition of Minitab is that it was developed as a Windows-first, Macintosh-ported program. Because of this, it shares several characteristics with oft-maligned ported products such as Word 6: it launches slowly, it’s huge (Minitab needs virtual memory on a 16MB Power Mac), and most tool-bar and icon conventions follow Microsoft — rather than Macintosh —conventions. Its 100 percent compatibility with both Mac and Windows will appeal to mixed environments, but its implementation is occasionally awkward and sluggish at some tasks, especially compared with Mac standbys Data Desk from Data Description or Abacus Concepts' Star View.

The Last Word

You can quickly program any statistical test not offered by Minitab with simple macros, making this a serious all-in-one package. The feature set covers the needs of every user, from first-year students to research professionals.

Seiter, Charles. (June 1996). Minitab 10 Xtra. Macworld. (pg. 66).

Download Minitab 10.51 Xtra for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II