SOFA

**SOFA**
Original author(s)	Grant Paton-Simpson
Developer(s)	Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd
Initial release	May 19, 2009 (0.6.8)
Stable release	1.5.4 (January 13, 2021; 3 years ago) [±]
Preview release	none [±]
Written in	Python
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	Multilingual
Type	Reporting and analysis software
License(s)	GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Website	sofastatistics.com

SOFA (Statistics Open For All) is a free open-source statistics, analysis, and reporting package.

Product history

On May 16 and 17, 2009, software developer Grant Paton-Simpson set up open-source projects on SourceForge, Launchpad, and Freecode^[2] and released SOFA version 0.6.8 two days later.^[1] Later in February 2010, Paton-Simpson detailed three reasons behind the motivation for the open-source project^[3]:

1. "So students can easily access useful and educational statistical software..."

2. "To allow smaller, or poorly-resourced organisations ... to conduct basic quantitative research and to generate useful ad hoc and routine reports"

3. "Because statistical thinking is a fantastic intellectual resource that deserves greater appreciation..."

In 2012, SOFA won the ZaReason People's Choice award and was a finalist for the Open Source Software Project award in the biennial New Zealand Open Source Awards.^[4]

Features

The main features of SOFA include^[5]:

developer focus on output's aesthetic
supports multiple direct database connections
supports MySQL, Microsoft Access, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and CUBRID databases
import from and export to Microsoft Excel
supports ODS, CSV, and Google Docs data imports
enter raw data into tables of built-in SQLite database
supports data recoding
HTML tabular output
extensive charting
wide variety of statistical options for data analysis
suggestions and impact analysis for proper tables and tests
scheduling/automation
Multilingual