Re: Using pspp

[Leonard Evens]

On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 18:40 +0000, John Darrington wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:18:18AM -0500, Leonard Evens wrote:
>      I have been using pspp from the gui version psppire.   I am running
>      version 0.6.1 under Fedora 11.  (The package is pspp-0.6.1-3.fc11.i586.)
>      But I am  unclear about some things.
>      
>      1> Is it possible to delete variables?   How about entries?
> 
> Yes and yes.  Right click on the row/column concerned and choose "Clear" 
> from the popup menu.  Alternatively select the row/column and from the Edit 
> menu choose the Clear item.

Thanks for responding.

>      
>      2> I've been running descriptive statistics for frequencies and
>      crosstabs.  But I have to copy what is in the output window each time
>      and paste it into a text file using gedit.  Is there some way using
>      psppire to put the output in a file?  
> 
> The output is by default put into a file called "psppire.txt".

Okay.  I found it in my home directory.  But I was working in another
directory.  Is there some way to specify a working directory?

> 
> 
>      Is there some way to control the
>      format of the output?  It often divides a cross tabulation table into
>      separate sub-tables, as might be required to continue on the next page,
>      and I then have to merge by deleting extra lines in gedit. 
> 
> Not from the GUI.  It's possible from the command line interface.  See the 
> section of the manual entitled "Output devices".
>      
>      Is there some way to show the details of how a recoded variable was
>      recoded?
> 
> I'm not sure that I understand this question.  There is a record of all 
> commands
> run in pspp.jnl if that helps.
Ah! in my home directory again.  It should be helpful in learning how to
use the command line version.
>      
>      3>  Supposedly pspp can produce graphs of various kinds, e.g.,
>      histograms.  Is this only possible by running pspp in a terminal window
>      at the command line?
> 
> Well you can also do it by running the commands in the GUI's syntax window.

I suppose it is moot, but I can't find a `syntax window'.  I can't find
any reference anywhere to any graphical procedure, e.g. histogram, in
psppire.

> However the problem is, that version 0.6.x doesn't have any way to actually
> display the graphs.   This is currently being addressed - if you're prepared
> to build the "output" branch from the git repository, then you can see what 
> progress has been made so far.
>      
>      4>  I have split the data on the values of a certain variable and then
>      run crosstabs on different pairs of variables.  Some of these variables
>      are recodings into new variables of other variables. (The split is done
>      on the basis of one of these recoded variables.) There appears to be
>      some sort of bug.  Namely, in some cases, perhaps only in cases of
>      recoded variables, the reported number of missing values is wrong in one
>      of the two sets produced by the split. In the errant set, the number
>      reported is the total number of missing values rather than just the
>      number for that set.  As far as I can tell the cross tabulations are
>      right for the valid data.
>      
>      I've reported this to the pgpp-bugs mailing list, but haven't gotten a
>      detailed response yet.  I presume it is possible I did something wrong.
>      e.g., in creating the recoded variables.  Can anyone suggest anything
>      which I might have done wrong?
> 
> Probably nothing.  The crosstabs command was completely rewritten in version 
> 0.7.x so hopefully this problem won't arise there.

I did compile a 0.7.x version from source but psppire crashed whenever I
tried to do anything with it.

Can you point me at some version which works?

>      
>      5>  Is there some tutorial which goes through various examples,
>      particularly  using psppire?  I've been studying the manual, but it
>      isn't a whole lot of help in using the pspire.
> 
> Unfortunately not.  Pspp started as a free replacement for Spss.  However
> it's starting to attract interest from people who have never used Spss, so
> it maybe time to write such a tutorial.  Any volunteers?

Fortunately, my wife once used SPSS extensively, so perhaps between us
we can figure out how to use the command line version.  They didn't have
a GUI version in  her days.

> 
> J'
>