RStudio gives R an interface much like MATLAB, and the little extra effort to code from MATLAB to R is much worth it.

Huge data and Excel in the same sentence, I am puzzled! ;) when I hear "huge data" my first instinct is to get out of Excel, so I'll be interested in seeing what answers you get, as I would be glad to be proven wrong on my excel prejudice... :)

Some people use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to program in Excel.

There are no good or bad answers, although I agree with Frenanda Dorea that large dataset and Excel might not mix well.

Use what you know. If you don't know any computer languages, ask around and see what people around use. When I was studying meteorology, I used Fortran and C because that was what others were using and that way I could re-use part of their code. Now I use mainly C++.

Keep in mind that Excel cannot compute sin(x) if x is greater than 10^9.

A comparison between SPSS, STATA, SAS, R and LibreOffice can be found at the thread:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/R_or_SAS_which_one_is_the_best_statistical_software_used_in_medical_field

Thanks a Ton !! to All.

I plan to use R or MATLAB but Presently struggling with R installation in MACBOOK.

Have to try MATLAB.

I suggest using MATLAB, which is ideally suited to mathematical and scienfific applications, and will work with large data.

Is there FREE MATLAB software????

RStudio gives R an interface much like MATLAB, and the little extra effort to code from MATLAB to R is much worth it.

GNU Octave is identical to Matlab: almost all commands work in Octave (sometimes even more efficient than Matlab)

If the objective is to look at climate model outputs then I assume data may be saved into NetCDF files. One possible choice is Climatic Data Analysis Tool (CDAT) which is based on python. It gives some build-in functionalities like regriding, smoothing, annual cycle calculations etc. But it's definitely not well documented than Matlab.

You can also use Fortran for analyze data in NetCDF file (http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/netcdf-f90/, http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/netcdf-f77/) You can find some suitable software for different data and metadata formats in the British Atmospheric Data Centre webpage (http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/help/formats/index.html)

CDO is great for netCDF. hdf4 and hdf5 tools for HDF files. R for ascii text.

For it R is the best my friend !!!

http://www.openair-project.org/PDF/OpenAir_Manual.pdf

good luck

Thanks Carlos..., But i need to analyse data in .xls, ascii, .grib, .netcdf, csv, txt, and sometimes .dat files also so i need a common language or Like Matlab to analyse all. Perl, Python, FORTRAN, c++, VB and are all available open source but learning and excelling in them will consume a lot time. And moreover each language is best with a few format of data, but which one is a onestop solution for all? thats my Issue....But atlast i finalised R and MatLab and installed in my lap...Still Find MatLab easier to learn than R. As for as I am concerned am going with MatLab, If any thing much better than this for the above said purpose am thankful to know that...

you can help from macro in excel and VBA

Of course keep your distance with EXCEL in these cases! if you want to take just a simple look at your data, you can use "010 Editor" software. For analyzing the huge data like .nc or .dat or any other kinds I suggest MATLAB (faster) or R.