I would, in due course, spend some time on the R Environment (available as part of DecisionStudio Professional, and separately downloadable from http://r-project.org). R provides an excellent alternative to commercial products for modeling, statistical analysis, and graphics. Originally designed by AT&T Bell Labs, the R environment is fast becoming the standard for cutting edge number crunching.

Bio-informatics is one area of dominance, and a lot of academic papers these days come with R based/compatible implementations. (So you don’t have to wait for your commercial BI vendor to first discover that new technique, make up its mind about it, and then finally get a bunch of disinterested code-monkeys to write a new library for, luckily just in time for the release after next).

While R is used a lot for statistical research, its adoption for econometrics has been comparatively slower, possibly due to terminology differences.

An excellent text called “Econometrics in R” by Grant V. Farnsworth (PDF) provides a effective hands-on intro to the most common things you would find yourself doing including Time Series, regressions, Plotting, etc. Have a look.