Jason Stover <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > SPSS has a "text import wizard" that walks the user through the > process of reading text data. It asks the user questions about > delimiters and whether variable names are at the top of the file, > etc., then runs DATA LIST to read the data. This is a good function to > have: Any frustration at the beginning of learning to use a new > program is likely to make a new user give up. Later frustrations, > after the user is a little familiar with the program, are less likely > to make a user quit altogether. Reading data is the first task of > any user, so it needs to be as easy as possible.
I have some ideas on how to guess the format of a text file, so that in many cases it would be unnecessary to specify the format. The UI would be like this: specify that you want to read a file as text, then it would bring up a dialog that shows a few lines of text from the file and how they would be interpreted by default, with a set of controls that allow you to override the defaults. If done competently, I think that this would indeed be "as easy as possible". -- Ben Pfaff http://benpfaff.org _______________________________________________ pspp-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev
