Your choice of research tools is probably determined through your history. Your education and research experience have lead you to certain instruments of choice, that feel ‘natural’ to you. However, from time to time you may want, or are forced to, reconsider. There are some aspects to this. To name some: function ( What do you do with the tool? ), data structure ( What kind of data are you processing and what does it look like? ), costs and availability, ease of migration ( Can you move your data to the other software? Can you move it away again? ), transfer-ability to colleagues ( If you collaborate or hand over, how easily will your colleagues deal with your software? ). Here, I will look at the structure of your data. I will show some examples of research data and discuss which software is in my view best suitable to handle the data.

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