How Do You Run Simple Statistical Analyses On Tab-Delimited Data In Word Docs?
I used to do this sort of thing with various data base programs. As a matter of fact, I recently took about 250 files worth of impulse waveform data, collected it into a coherent whole and crunched it using a handful of programs, including Excel. Tedious, but do-able! Lots of scripts, macros, batch files, etc. Excel is limited in query functions, and unless you are a real wiz with it, you are shoehorning the data into an application that may not be the best one. IMO, the very first thing you need to do is homogenize your data and expand it by adding a field describing its origin( i.e., a field (column) with the Word file name in it or the name of the survey or the date of the survey or something similar.) You’ll have an easier time crunching it if all the data is in one big ass file. If you are already familiar with Word/Excel macros, then you have a head start, but if you aren’t, better allow a day or two to get up to speed with them and do a lot of tests to make sure you are processi
Yeah, if you don’t want to learn VBA, here’s a brute-force method. You could open all your word docs as excel files (they’re already tab-delimited, so it should work, though you might have to change the file extensions.) You can copy-paste each document into an enormo-spreadsheet with something like 10 keystrokes per file: Start in the upper left hand of the new file, ctrl-shift-right, then ctrl-shift-down to select the table, ctrl-c to copy it, alt-tab to your new enormo-sheet, ctrl-v to paste it, alt-tab back, ctrl-w to close this document, revealing the next one to do. Each subsequent time you come to the enormo file, you’ll need probably 3 more for positioning your cursor where you want the next table to go. Space out for maybe 45 minutes, give yourself carpal tunnel, and you’re done.
Just for the record, I took a look at some samples, and unfortunately, the way they were typed meant they failed dotpoint number three — where there were seven columns of data, one of them empty, the typist should have done this: COL: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7DATA: a [tab] b [tab] [tab] c [tab] d [tab] e [tab] f where there’s nothing in column 3, but instead they’d done this: COL: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7DATA: a [tab] b [tab ]c [tab] d [tab] e [tab] f and the futzed with the ruler in Word to force the columns to line up. So unfortunately there’s no way to figure out which of the seven columns those six bits of data belonged to.
