​Re: PSPP CTABLES

[Michał Dubrawski]

Hi Ben, 

it is great to hear that you are working with spv output. I know that they were changing it from version to version so it seem like quite a challenge, but based on what challenges you have faced before when making PSPP compatible to SPSS I'm sure you will handle it :)

CTABLES or Tables in the future will be very useful but I think that what would be most important for students, social sicentists, psychologists, market researchers or virtualy anyone who analyse any survey results would be the possibility to display mrsets in one table, which could be done in SPSS with  MULT RESPONSE command. Without it PSPP wouldn't be an option to display survey results because almost all surveys have multi response questions. The only free alternative would be some packages in R which are not as accessible (easy to use) as PSPP. 

Any way to display MRSETS in the PSPP output would be very valuable for a lot of people even if it would be a cross tabs extension allowing the usage of mrsets in it or something like that. When people graduate from psychology, sociology, social science or pedagogics departments they have knowledge how to build a surveys - there are a lot of tools that allow them to collect data via online surveys, but when it comes to displaying the results in tables for the reports they all have a software problem because many non-profits and startups cannot afford SPSS + Custom Tables licenses, and from my experience that is exactly the software they know how to use because of their Universities.

That said, thanks again to Ben and all the developers and all other people involved with PSPP project - you have done tremendous work so far.

Michał Dubrawski,

Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2018 08:48:33 -0700
From: Ben Pfaff <address@hidden>
To: Alan Mead <address@hidden>
Cc: "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
Subject:

​​

Re: PSPP CTABLES
Message-ID: <20180725154833.GF18660@sigabrt.benpfaff.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

I think it's likely that I'll change PSPP to use the same output model.
One reason that it differed until now is simply that it wasn't clear to
me how SPSS really modeled output.  The documentation on it is pretty
muddy.

I've now got code that reads and understands most .spv files just fine.
I'm still working on reading the oldest kind of .spv files, which use a
really funny way to encode tables.

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 10:32:11AM -0500, Alan Mead wrote:
> FWIW, I'm excited that you're working on reading SPV format. I had
> assumed that the implicit output model might preclude compatibility.
>
> -Alan
>
> On 7/24/2018 4:30 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> > There might be some small hope here because I've been spending a lot of
> > time lately working to make PSPP understand SPSS's .spv output file
> > format, so that it can read (and write?) it directly.  Implicit in that
> > format is an understanding of the SPSS output model, which seems to be
> > entangled quite a bit with the CTABLES syntax.  It might therefore lead
> > someday to CTABLES implementation (but not soon).
> >
> > On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 09:21:11PM +0000, Crichton, Ronald wrote:
> >> I asked about this a few years ago.  I gather it would be difficult. Mind you, I used TABLES in SPSS in about 1990 and got to quite like it and used it a lot. So, here we are in 2018 and I use CTABLES in SPSS, and can?t get the hang of it, at least not much more than the basic usage of it. Can?t stand it. I long for the old TABLES function. Not available in SPSS. So, here?s the thing: perhaps PSPP should develop its own version of TABLES with just the basics, without trying to emulate SPSS because they have stuffed up something that used to be quite good.
> >>
> >> From: Pspp-users [mailto:pspp-users-bounces+ronald.crichton=cit.edu.au@gnu.org] On Behalf Of Jakub ?krob?nek
> >> Sent: Tuesday, 24 July 2018 6:29 PM
> >> To: address@hidden
> >> Subject: PSPP CTABLES
> >>
> >> Hi, I would like to ask if there is any progression in CTABLES implementation to PSPP. I read some threads (http://pspp-users.gnu.narkive.com/r32JwdwI/what-features-of-custom-tables-ctables-are-most-important) but they seems dead. Any suggestion?
> >> Kind regards
> >>
> >> Jacob
> >>
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> --
>
> Alan D. Mead, Ph.D.
> President, Talent Algorithms Inc.
>
> science + technology = better workers
>
> http://www.alanmead.org
>
> "You're an interesting species. An interesting mix.
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>
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>
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