Forgive me if I insist: (C)TABLES belongs to a time when we
delivered mass "big banner" cross tabulations in an appendix for an
end user who had no access to the data. I almost dare say it
encourages bad practice.
Since all of us seem to agree that aesthetics are not the reason for
wanting CTABLES, why not concentrate on implementing macros instead?
I believe it is possible to create tables of any complexity, through
various stages of AGGREGATE.
That's a pain, I agree, and that's where macros come in. Macros
would allow dummies like me to contribute table formats (that's a
promise), and to exchange contributions with the SPSS community.
Last but not least, macros would be useful for a lot of other
reasons anyway (as an example see the WRITE / INCLUDE in
http://spsstools.net/en/syntax/24/).
Regards
frans
On 07/11/2015 21:49, Alan Mead wrote:
What does CTABLES do? And what aspects of CTABLES would be
critical for users? I think a plan should be the first step. If
CTABLES were part of PSPP, is the output OK? Or would that be the
next hurdle to using PSPP that the output isn't the same as SPSS
(e.g., I find it harder to copy-and-paste from PSPP into
LibreOffice than SPSS; when you copy a chart from SPSS for
Windows, it's actually placing several versions of the chart in
the paste buffer). If the output won't ultimately be useable, that
makes adding CTABLES a waste of time...
Also, I'm sure CTABLES is very important to some people but a lot
of SPSS users probably have never used CTABLES (just like they've
never used any of the other special modules SPSS publishes or even
the new features like python scripting). I think that contributes
to its absence in PSPP.
Finally, I know how statistics are calculated, but not only don't
I know what CTABLES does but I understand that the emphasis is on
simply tallies across complex breakdowns... I don't have any feel
for how one efficiently does this in code.
BTW, I think a better big project would be to enable PSPP to read
the SPSS output format. I know Ben enjoys reverse engineering
things. Thanks largely to Ben and PSPP contributors, the SPSS file
format is widely read (e.g., the R foreign package is based on
Ben's code to read SPSS .SAV files) but the output is completely
opaque to all programs except SPSS. In fact, it's worse than that
because there are versions of SPSS that won't read other
versions. That's actually a huge problem for people who used SPSS
to analyze data and all they kept was the output files or anyone
who ever saved the output in the hope that they could read it
years later....
-Alan
On 11/7/2015 5:22 AM, Matthias Faeth
wrote:
I think we have to find somebody who has done that kind
of project steering before (I haven't). Can everybody look
into their contacts to find somebody who would have the
skills and will to steer such a project?
However I'd volunteer to participate in the workgroup
defining the priority of the functions of the CTABLES
command. Maybe Frans and Alan would want to join?
I agree with John that a commercial implementation would
produce 5 figured cost. I've already talked to a programmer on
this and he came up with the same estimate. So doing it
commercially seems to be no way forward.
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Alan D. Mead, Ph.D.
President, Talent Algorithms Inc.
science + technology = better workers
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