Re: Import / Export Functions and other features missing for academic and office use in urban planning

[Zoltan FABIAN]

Dear Roman,

Welcome to the list. Being a user, from my perspective PSPP is indeed a 
great open source alternative to SPSS, although it's capabilities are 
limited compared to SPSS because of obvious reasons. As time goes by and 
the community grows, the current state of lagging behind SPSS should 
change, hopefully.
However, there are other open source applications now that can be used 
together with PSPP: namely R-CRAN and Open/Libre Office. They are able 
to import/export to/from major formats such as CVS text or other 
delimited data. (Note that R-CRAN uses PSPP algorithms to handle SPSS 
formats.)
I am sure, that from a developer perspective, you will get a more 
competent answer.

Cheers,

Zoltan

PS. There are some nonfree alternatives to SPSS which are probably 
cheaper than IBM/Statistics/SPSS such as StatTransfer that can be useful 
to convert from/to proprietary formats such as STATA or SAS.
Of course I would recommend to stick to open source solutions.


On 09/05/11 20:37, Roman Seidl wrote:
> Dear PSPP users/developers,
>
> as SPSS is much too expensive for any normal use and they have abandoned
> any campus licensing (probably they don't want new customers) we are
> evaluating alternatives.
>
> Last semester a student of mine did an evaluation of PSPP (s.
> http://openplanningtools.org/Statistik%20mit%20PSPP - in German -
> linking this page is welcome if you find it of interest).
>
> The main problem of PSPP in our use is the limited import and export
> capabilities. Rather than needing sav or por file formats which not of
> any interest when not using spss we would need for things like dbf, xls
> and maybe odt. Aren't there some GPLed libraries somewhere which could
> be easily integrated?
>
> Is anybody having the same problems?
>
> The second most annoying thing was PSPP's behavior to not warn you when
> you open another file when there is an unsaved dataset. This will lead
> to mistakes...
>
> Having better import/export possibilities and a warning when opening
> another dataset if the current one is modified would make pspp equal to
> better for our use. So pspp is already a great product - there is only a
> few details missing.
>
> Best regards
> roman
>
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