John, Way back in time, around 1977-78, at the first SPSS users group meeting in Chicago, I remember at how surprised Norman Nie and others were that most users were using SPSS for data management needs, and not for statistical procedures. I believe the most heavily used statistical procedures at that time, based on a quick survey they had done, were Frequencies, Crosstabs and Breakdown. Certainly my use of SPSS over the years involved mostly taking a data set of some structure, doing Recodes/Computes, and then Exporting the data into a new format that would be used later for more in-depth statistical analysis, say a Regression procedure or Correlation analysis. For example, one of the biggest things I did with SPSS was to take a raw data file, and use Computes and Recodes to clean the data set up, use Aggregate to create summary totals, and Export the data to be used by spreadsheet software. SPSS, at least to me, had a syntax that made it easy for an analyst to take a raw data file and transform it into what they ultimately wanted to do. When SPSS added the Mult Response command set, and then followed that up with the Complex Files procedures, a user really had a very powerful data management tool set available that could really begin to tease out data relationships that prior to this had required expensive custom computer programming to get similar results. Obviously, the statistical procedures are important. But for those who are analyzing large amounts of data, the restructuring or reorganization of the data to get to the point of using a stat procedure are where analysts spend a large amount of time. Anything that can make that task easier is viewed as a big plus by most analysts. Marshall
-----Original Message----- From: pspp-users-bounces+mdb=radix....@gnu.org [mailto:pspp-users-bounces+mdb=radix....@gnu.org] On Behalf Of John Darrington Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2011 3:59 AM To: Roman Seidl Cc: pspp-users@gnu.org Subject: Re: Import / Export Functions and other features missing for academic and office use in urban planning On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 06:36:05PM +0200, Roman Seidl wrote: I was confused when mentioning ODT - which seem to work for the output (which is certainly very nice to have). I was actually thinking about ODS, XLS or DBF as a means to import and export the current dataset. I could not find out how to import ODS in 0.7.7 though Wikipedia (well Wikipedia...) claims it should be possible (s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPP, last modified on 30 January 2011 at 04:03). The only way to get Data out of PSPP for now seems to be exporting to a text file which is a quite tedious job as the docs seem to be rather bad and there is no such thing as a wizard. I'm rather interested to know why you place so much importance on exporting the data. I've always considered PSPP (and spss) as a tool to analyse data, not (primarily) to process it. Therefore, there are a number of ways in which you can import data, and there are a number of formats to which you can export the results of your analysis (ie, the tables showing T-test, Anova, etc). However, like you say, exporting data hasn't been a feature upon which the developers have placed great emphasis. But the fact that you are wanting to export data from PSPP seems to suggest that you're using it primarily for its data manipulation capabilities (eg, SORT, FLIP, AGGREGATE etc) rather than for performing statistical analysis. Can you give a typical workflow example of your usage? And what features do you actually use within PSPP (between having got the data in, and getting it back out again)? J' -- PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285 A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3 See http://pgp.mit.edu or any PGP keyserver for public key. _______________________________________________ Pspp-users mailing list Pspp-users@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-users
