Re: Excell to PSPP direct?

[Francis L. Young III]

When you save the csv file you must be aware of what character you are
using. Last I uses MS Excel, the default character was something funky.
Make sure you are using commas on the export, and commas on the import.


On 02/14/2014 08:44 AM, Thambu David wrote:
> Well ,downloaded Libre Office and imported the Excell sheet and saved it. 
> Tried importing to the pspp but failed!
> Help!
> 
> Dr Thambu David S
> Professor and Head
> Medicine Unit 2
> Christian Medical College, Vellore
> 632004, India
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: Alan Mead address@hidden
> Sent: Friday, February 14, 2014 9:12 PM
> To: address@hidden; Thambu David
> Subject: Re: Excell to PSPP direct?
> 
> Thambu,
> 
> What you're asking is not practical and perhaps impossible. Microsoft's
> Office formats are extremely complex. I don't know how SPSS reads them
> but I know it's very brittle. In the past, when I have saved data as an
> .XLS file using LibreOffice, SPSS has failed to import it.  Also, Office
> 2010 has support for the Open Document Format that LibreOffice uses but
> when Word tries to open the .ODT files I create using LibreOffice, it
> reports them as "damaged" and needs to "recover" the file to open it.
> 
> If Microsoft and SPSS cannot handle these formats properly, it seems
> impractical to hope that a small, open-source project could possible
> solve these problems.
> 
> I second John's reply. I have LibreOffice and MS Office 2010 installed
> and I can use LibreOffice for virtually all the tasks I need to do.
> LibreOffice, BTW, is far superior in my experience in exporting CSV.  It
> allows you to pick the character encoding, the delimiter, and the
> quoting. The nice thing about picking the encoding is it the language is
> English (i.e., if the data can be represented by ASCII) then I pick that
> and things like smartquotes are automatically converted.  When I export
> CSV from Excel, I get an unholy mess of quoted and non-quoted data in
> whatever encoding Excel chooses.
> 
> One other suggestion, why not teach statistics entirely in
> Excel/LibreOffice Calc? That's what many business schools do in the US.
> Or, failing that, why not use SPSS/PSPP for all your needs? They're
> basically advanced spreadsheets where you put the equations into syntax
> instead of into the cells.
> 
> I do have a final suggestion that more directly addresses your question.
> I think you just have matters backwards.  Microsoft is a
> multi-multi-multi-billion-dollar company with billions of dollars in
> reserves and literally an army of developers. If Microsoft decided to
> make it easy for third parties to read their formats, it would be
> practically feasible for them to do so.  I suggest that you contact
> Microsoft and ask that they make their formats more interoperable or
> release open-source libraries for reading their file formats.  The new
> CEO's name is Satya Nadella. I suggest you contact him directly.
> 
> -Alan
> 
> 
> On 2/14/2014 8:00 AM, Thambu David wrote:
>> Dear All
>> Is it possible for PSPP to directly import files from Excell without making 
>> them CSV-often this does not seem v straightforward
>> It would make implementing this as a SPSS alternate much easier
>> Most students and faculty are looking for a legal free alternate,but this is 
>> one area of difficulty
>> I hope the plan for this year could include this (if possible) being added 
>> to the to-do list
>> Thanks in advance
>> regards
>> Thambu
>>
>>
>> Dr Thambu David S
>> Professor and Head
>> Medicine Unit 2
>> Christian Medical College, Vellore
>> 632004, India
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pspp-users mailing list
>> address@hidden
>> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-users
>>
>> --
>> Alan D. Mead, Ph.D.
>> Assistant Professor
>> Industrial and Organizational Psychology Program
>> Department of Psychology
>> Lewis College of Human Sciences
>> Illinois Institute of Technology
>> 3101 South Dearborn, 2nd floor
>> Chicago IL 60616
>>
>> +312.567.5933 (Campus)
>> +815.588.3846 (Home Office)
>> +267.334.4143 (Mobile)
>> +312.567.3493 (Fax)
>>
>> http://www.iit.edu/~mead
>> http://www.alanmead.org
>>
>> Announcing the Journal of Computerized Adaptive Testing (JCAT), a
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>> practice of computerized adaptive testing: http://www.iacat.org/jcat
> 
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