WinIDAMS is a software written by Unesco Secretariat with the co-operation of experts from different countries. It is available freely on request (you need to fill in a form on their website, after that they tell you the exact path where you can download the software and the manual). In the next future a project called OpenIdams ought to begin , so to make this software open source, and consequently extensible thanks to external contributes.
WinIDAMS is available only for Windows operating system (hence its name). Besides english, its module is also available in french and spanish.
The main analysis methods WinIDAMS can carry out are:
· regression analysis
· analysis of variance
· discriminant analysis
· cluster analysis
· principal component analysis
· correspondence analysis
WinIDAMS can import spreadsheet files if they are saved in text or csv format.
A description of the various functions availables in WinIDAMS can be found here, furthermore there is also a web version of the manual (besides the downloadable version).
In reference to its user interface, WinIDAMS has selectable options from a windows-style menu.
The first step to do to carry out an analysis in WinIDAMS is defining the application environment (specifing the name of the application you want to create and the folder paths of input and output files). Then you need to create the dictionary file in which specifing the variables of the dataset to analyse.
After preparing the dictionary file (dic extension), the following step is creating the data file (dat extension) in which entering values of observations to analyse.
Finally you have to build the setup file (set extension) typing a list of instructions (which depends on the kind of analysis and which can be found on the manual) to execute. When execution is finished, an output file including all the results is loaded.
