One of the appealing benefits of buying a microcomputer is the ability to do statistical analyses without competing for access and paying for time on a mainframe computer. The difficult decision is which statistical package to buy. Just as there is no single best microcomputer because everyone's needs are different, there is no single best statistical package. This article, based on my experience reviewing statistical packages for the Statistical Computing Support Group at Cornell, discusses some of the considerations in selecting a package. Although I will concentrate on the general-purpose packages, many of the same concerns are also appropriate for specialized packages, such as those avail able for time-series analysis, matrix operations, or econometrics.