thomblake comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (479)
Actually, what I'd recommend doing for real, is moving the data to a better spreadsheet program like Open Office, doing the split programmatically there (as suggested elsewhere), and then importing the data into SPSS.
SPSS is a software build for doing statistics. There should be a way in SPSS to do this that's better than switching to a different software.
It's software built for doing statistics a long time ago. And it makes certain assumptions about the sorts of data you're going to be giving it. This is a solution for dealing with Google's silly nonstandard way of representing multi-punch lists, not a solution to a statistical problem. It's totally reasonable to process the raw data using some other program or script before sending it to SPSS - it's what the pros do anyway.
R is a free - and imo better - alternative.
I'm personally using R myself. That's why I can't imagine it to be hard is SPSS because. If Yvain has however spent time learning SPSS it might be costly to relearn things in R.