On Friday 12 Feb 2010, John Cooper wrote:
> On-line converter :-
>
> http://pspp.benpfaff.org/
Thanks for this John (and the previous script based tool). This is
interesting because it's clear that PSPP provides a much more powerful UI in
the shell than it does in the GUI; as far as I can tell, this cannot be done
in the GUI.
The web based converter actually does a good job of converting the data in the
file to text (comma separated, with a variable number of spaces between each
value), but it doesn't save the variables (eg the column/row headings), so
there is a bit of a hole in the data.
The shell script saves everything as three files; the data in text form (space
separated, with a variable number of spaces between each value) and the
variables as text and as html.
The output of both of these is good in that you can get at the data, but not
brilliant for a semi-computer literate person like my daughter (or most
students, I would have thought). On the one hand, you have to be competent
enough to run a shell script and then meld the two components after importing
the data with the right separators. On the other, the import is a bit easier,
because the commas make it obvious where the delimiters are, but there is no
indication of what the variables were.
Clearly the best approach is to run PSPP on the machine an look at the data in
the GUI, then extract the data with the script, reassemble it in OpenOffice
and make it look the same as the original.
I guess those who haven't got access to Linux have to put their hands in their
pockets or risk downloading a virus. ;-)
--
Terry Coles
64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux
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