Re: PSPP-BUG: bugs in PSPP 1.4.1 for Windows

[Ben Pfaff]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 12:29 PM <matt@evansevaluation.com> wrote:
> Commands (or at least a number of commands I’ve tried) don’t work if there 
> are hard returns / carriage returns in them.
>
>
>
> EXAMPLE 1: THIS DOES NOT WORK
>
> variable labels
> gender 'This is the gender variable'.
>
>
> HOWEVER THIS DOES WORK:
> variable labels gender 'This is the gender variable'.

Thanks for using PSPP.

Is this in the GUI? I am a bit surprised. The GUI should be tolerant of multiple
kinds of syntax, including this one. I cannot check the source code right now,
but I'll do so later and fix it if I see that it's not doing what I
think it should.

Given that it's not actually working as I would expect, I think that you can
make it work by indenting the second and subsequent lines of a command,
for example by adding a space before "gender" on the second line above.
That should not be needed, but given the behavior you report, it can be a
way to work around the problem.

> I also can't manually copy and paste anything in the data editor—e.g., 
> variable names or variable labels or value labels—either from outside PSPP, 
> like Excel, or from inside PSPP, like copying a set of value labels from one 
> variable onto another long list of variables that use the same value labels 
> (e.g., all common Likert scales like 1=Strongly Disagree to 5=Strongly 
> Agree). I know these things can be done using syntax but it’s MUCH easier to 
> just copy and paste them. Please save me from spending $3,000 on an SPSS 
> perpetual license. That’s not bearable, but neither are these inconveniences 
> in PSPP over the long run!    Thanks much,

I think that these are genuinely missing features in the GUI.

I'm not sure whether you're talking about editing data or variables or
both. I'm going to assume it's about editing variables. Most of what
you're talking about is straightforward in concept, especially cutting
and pasting from one variable in the dictionary to another. The one
I'm not sure about is cutting and pasting from a spreadsheet to a set
of value labels. It's not obvious to me how that would work. Does SPSS
support that? Is it documented? It would be good to know what to
implement here.