Section author: Danielle J. Navarro and David R. Foxcroft

Installating and starting jamovi

Installation

Let’s get started. Just as with any piece of software, jamovi needs to be installed on a “computer”, which is a magical box that does cool things and delivers free ponies. Or something along those lines; I may be confusing computers with the iPad marketing campaigns. Anyway, jamovi is freely distributed online and you can download it from the jamovi homepage, which is:

At the top of the page, under the heading “Download”, you’ll see separate links for Windows users, Mac users, and Linux users. If you follow the relevant link you’ll see that the online instructions are pretty self-explanatory.[1]

Whereas this text book was one of the first resources available to support jamovi, there is now an abundance of them: Have a look under “resources” → community resources on the jamovi homepage.

The jamovi window

One way or another, regardless of what operating system you’re using, it’s time to open jamovi and get started. When first starting jamovi you will be presented with a user interface which looks something like Fig. 2.

jamovi start window

Fig. 2 jamovi looks like this when you start it.

To the left is the spreadsheet view, and to the right is where the results of your statistical analyses appear. Down the middle is a bar separating these two regions and this can be dragged to the left or the right to change their sizes.

The first time you open jamovi, you may want to change some of the default settings. These can be accessed from the settings menu (, at the top-left corner). You can for example change there how many decimals you would like to be displayed in your analyses’ output, the plot and color schemes for your figures and (since version 2.3 of jamovi) also the language of your jamovi user interface. On most operating systems (OS), the language defaults to the language you have set for your OS.[#]

To quit jamovi, just close the program the same way you would any other program. However, what you might want to do before you quit is save your work! There are two parts to this: saving any changes to the data set, and saving the analyses that you ran. It is good practice to save any changes to the data set as a new data set. jamovi saves both the data and any analyses you have undertaken within the same jamovi file. From the main jamovi menu () select Save as and type in a file name for your jamovi file (.omv). Remember to save the file in a location where you can find it again later. I usually create a new folder for specific data sets and analyses. Alternatively, you can Export your data into a format for other statistics packages (R, SPSS, SAS, Stata) or as CSV-file that you can open with virtually all programs that you may use for statistical analyses. You can, in addition, Export the output of your analyses as PDF, HTML or as LaTeX-document.


[1]Although jamovi is updated frequently it doesn’t usually make much of a difference for the sort of work we’ll do in this book. In fact, during the writing of the book I upgraded several times and it didn’t make much difference at all to what is in this book.
[2]Please note that the figures (screenshots, etc.) within this book are using the English user interface.