The Simfit/Excel interface

Abstract

If your data are in the Microsoft Office spreadsheet Excel you may wish to analyse them using Simfit, and there are three ways this can be done. You can copy and paste using the clipboard, you can write out a table in ASCII comma delimited format to a file, or you can use the Excel macros (called simfit?.xls) distributed with Simfit. In each case you start in the same way by collecting together the data columns of interest into a contiguous, selected (i.e. highlighted) block. Note that this block can only have missing values or text labels if you intend to use the Simfit program MAKSIM to create a Simfit file, and then the text must have no spaces in labels. Excel uses tabs to ensure that text like Date of Birth can represent a single cell, but Simfit regards spaces and commas as separators, so you have to use labels like Date-of-Birth or similar.

Method 1: Using the clipboard

Copy the selected table to the clipboard and then either paste it into the Simfit program when asked for data input, or paste it into program MAKSIM to create a data file.

Method 2: Creating ASCII files

Copy the selected table to a comma delimited ASCII file, but before this can be read into Simfit it must be processed by program MAKSIM in order to create a Simfit data file.

Method 3: Using the Simfit Excel macros

You will have to investigate the macros (simfit?.xls) supplied with Simfit to find one that works for your puroposes. There are several macros for the alternative versions of Microsoft Office, and there are variants with different functions. It is necessay to open a simfit?.xls macro before selecting a data table for writing to a file. Then, after selecting an Excel table, you open the appropriate macro from Excel by selecting the Tools options then the macro required to create a correctly formatted file (if the table is consistent).

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