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The Tools I Use

The set-up interviews on usethis.com really spark my curiosity to find out what hardware and software is used by others. For me it is a continuous inspiration and a valuable source of information to see what others use and read about their workflow.

So I decided to briefly share my set-up here.

For quantitative analysis I generally use R and Stata. My workflow might involve both. Sometime I use R for data preparation and subsequently switch to Stata for the econometric analysis. Sometimes I use Stata for data preparation and then I export the data to R for analysis. Occasionally I use Excel or Access for data manipulation. The fabulous RStudio makes coding in R a real pleasure. For network analyses I either employ the R-package sna or I use Gephi.

Generally I use MS Word for writing. This is determined by my co-authors rather than by my personal preferences which clearly lean towards LaTeX. I recently switched to Atom and do some of my shorter writing using Markdown syntax. This is works really brilliantly. For my presentations I tend to rely on MS Powerpoint. However, I have recently experimented with HTML5 presentations through RStudio – very light weight and promising. Also Deckset provides a nice way of quickly tailoring interesting presentations in Markdown.

I manage the papers I read and cite though Mendeley with an excellent automatic export of bibtex-files.

I collect ideas, photos, notes etc with Evernote. For brainstorming and mind-mapping I use XMind.

For questions or suggestions just send me a message.