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OMNITAB 80

OMNITAB 80

OMNITAB 80 is a high-level statistical analysis program. OMNITAB, the precursor of Minitab(TM), was developed in the Statistical Engineering Division and is maintained by the Statistical Engineering Division. OMNITAB performs many different statistical analyses including: arithmetic and trigonometric calculations, and matrix and array operations. The software responds to simple instructions and uses reliable computational algorithms.

NOTE: OMNITAB was commercialized by MINITAB in the 1980's, at which time active development of OMNITAB ceased. The documentation for OMNITAB was published 1986, and there has been no significant development since then. However, MINITAB is still being actively developed. For that reason, it is not accurate to think of OMNITAB as a free version of MINITAB. We provide OMNITAB to support legacy applications. However, there is no active consulting support beyond providing the software. Also, there are no formal ties between NIST and MINITAB. Any inquiries regarding MINITAB should be addressed directly to MINITAB.

Major capabilities of Omnitab include:

  • Statistical analyses, including

    • Regression analysis

    • Analysis of variance

  • Arithmetic operations

  • Data manipulation

  • Matrix and array operations

  • Probability functions

An important feature of OMNITAB is that the regression and analysis of variance commands produce automatic outputs showing relevant statistics, standard deviations and diagnostic plots.

Primary documentation for OMNITAB is available as a NIST Special Publication:

Peavy, Sally T., Bremer, Shirley G., Varner, Ruth N., Hogben, David (1986). OMNITAB 80: An Interpretive System for Statistical and Numerical Analysis. NBS Special Publication 701, available from NIST, Gaithersburg, MD 20899.

You can now download this document in PDF format (approximately 41MB).

The PC executable file can be downloaded here, or it can be downloaded using anonymous ftp.

ftp  ftp.nist.gov
  user> anonymous
  password>  your e-mail address
  >cd  pub/dataplot/omnitab
  >binary
  >get omnitab.exe  c:\omnitab.exe
  >quit

The downloaded file is the OMNITAB executable file, not an "install" file.  The executable can be saved in any directory that is convenient. To run OMNITAB, just open a DOS prompt window and type C:\OMNITAB.EXE using the path appropriate for the location of the file.

For Unix, a compressed tar file of the source is available.  This tar file contains an executable for the Sun.  For other platforms, use the makefile to build an executable from the source.

Contact Alan Heckert, alan.heckert [at] nist.gov (alan[dot]heckert[at]nist[dot]gov), if you would like to obtain either a Unix or PC version of Omnitab.

Created July 25, 2012, Updated March 23, 2018