For some, this spans three or even four decades. It was in the late 1960s when the the first electronic, programmable replacements for counter sorters were unveiled, with their clattering printers that lined up wobbling ranks of capital letters and numbers on huge sheets of paper faster than anyone could type. But being in at the start of a revolution has its drawbacks. Too much output today still looks as if it came out of one of those vintage line printers. It is primitive, bulky and above all, hard to read.
Some packages are better than others in producing high quality output.
By high quality, I mean with different, proportional fonts, with the ability to emphasise items by emboldening, drawing lines, adding boxes and so on. Some, though by no means all of the PC packages do provide this kind of output. Typically the ones adapted for Windows tend to be best. Both SPSS and Mercator 's SNAP produce the sort of tables you would be proud to show to a client or hold up in a presentation, and are ideal in the end-user situation. What is more, to import the files they produce into a word processor to make it look pretty is painstaking and very time consuming.