Try SOFA (http://www.sofastatistics.com/) alongside R. SOFA (Statistics Open For All) focuses on making some of the most important statistical tests easy to use and understand. It also has attractive charting and report tables. There are also videos, on-line documentation, and direct support from the developer. Disclosure #1 - I am the lead developer of SOFA. #2 I already posted accidentally as AC

Non-statisticians are always going to be doing statistics. Perhaps from a purist point of view they shouldn't, but they will. They might be health researchers, business analysts etc, and their job requires the use of statistics. Unfortunately, many statistical packages assume people can be trusted to choose the right test and interpret it correctly. But that isn't enough, and even some of the more helpful wizards and documentation are inadequate. The open source SOFA (Statistics Open For All - https://sourceforge.net/projects/sofastatistics/) project is an attempt to provide the required guidance and tools and is looking for people to join the community.

Investigative journalism is dying; citizens need direct access to government data and the tools to analyse it themselves. We can't rely on the media to expose flaws in government policy any more so we need:

• data
• meta-data e.g. how to avoid obvious misinterpretations, errors etc
• free tools for storing data (and running basic analyses) e.g. SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL etc
• free tools for analysing data e.g. R, SOFA (Statistics Open For All - https://sourceforge.net/projects/sofastatistics/) etc
• free resources for learning about analysis e.g. CAST (http://cast.massey.ac.nz/collection_public.html), wikipedia etc
• free tools for presenting and disseminating results e.g. OpenOffice Impress, WordPress etc

Less embarrassing than having to explain the main OSS image program is called the GIMP