Re: Excell to PSPP direct?

[Alan Mead]

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
>
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> --
> Alan D. Mead, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Industrial and Organizational Psychology Program
> Department of Psychology
> Lewis College of Human Sciences
> Illinois Institute of Technology
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