Re: Import Codebook

[Alan Mead]

I find applying labels to be very time-consuming, so maybe that's bad news for you. Maybe someone else will have a great idea.

But to make it as quick as possible, I'd recommend that you generate syntax and execute that syntax. I think that will be MUCH quicker than individually clicking and editing these values using the graphical user interface.

A lot of people are scared of syntax, but it's not so hard. An added advantage of doing it this way is that you easily fix an error by fixing the syntax and re-running it.

Also, if you have the information in a spreadsheet, I would try to generate the syntax using formulas in the spreadsheet. If column A contained the spss variable name (maybe "V1") and column B contained the variable label, then into cell C1 I would insert:

="variable labels "&A1&" '"&B1&"'." 

(Note that there are single quotes, inside the double quotes, around B1 because it's a string.)

If A1 = V1 and B1 = Beschriftung then this would generate:

variable labels V1 'Beschriftung'.

And if you paste that into a syntax window, add the line "Execute." and run it, it would label this variable. You could paste 200 rows of Column C, add "Execute." and create the 200 variable labels very easily.

The value labels could be done similarly but I'd have to see the spreadsheet to devise the correct formula(s)...

This page describes the syntax:

http://www.statsmakemecry.com/smmctheblog/using-syntax-to-assign-variable-labels-and-value-labels-in-s.html

This includes my solution and suggests an alternative (that may not work with PSPP):

https://www.reddit.com/r/spss/comments/mobw0z/import_excel_file_while_maintaining_variable/

Here are the relevant PSPP manual pages:

https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/manual/html_node/VALUE-LABELS.html

https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/manual/html_node/VARIABLE-LABELS.html

https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/manual/html_node/MISSING-VALUES.html

-Alan

On 1/19/2022 9:01 AM, Marek Ludwig wrote:

Dear All, 

we have read in a CSV dataset that we had generated from an Excel file. Unfortunately, the codebook got lost in the process, so that the columns for labels("Beschriftung"), value labels ("Wertelabels") and missing values ("Fehlende Werte") are empty. Since our dataset has over 200 variables, filling them in manually would be very time consuming. Is there an efficient, faster solution to read in the codebook or fill in these columns? 

I would be very grateful for a hint!

Thanks a lot,

Marek

-- 

Alan D. Mead, Ph.D.
President, Talent Algorithms Inc.

science + technology = better workers

https://talalg.com


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