Dear EpiData developers:
Excellent news then - thank you for putting continued effort into the development. Just a comment on the "shrinkage" in Export options:
I support this as a most rational and efficient approach. SAS remains seemingly the US government's choice, and it makes sense there, but it is not the most commonly used software among individual and academic institutional users, not least because of cost implications. Stata has been steadily gaining ground over SPSS and appears to be one of the top choices for professional epidemiologists while R is the dominant package for professional statisticians. R neatly reads (through its foreign package) Stata files and most decent analysis software will do so alike. When push comes to shove, (probably) all software will read a text file [requiring though adding one's own labels from a code book]. The proposed approach will guarantee 1) ease of maintenance during development, 2) ability to use a data set with proper meta-data in any software that reads Stata files, and 3) reading the data into any other software. This should free up development time rather than trying to keep up with constantly changing formats.
Good move!
Hans
On 21-Jun-16 14:05, EpiData development and support wrote:
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I expect that we will no longer support export to SPSS and SAS since the maintenance of these two is cumbersome. The reason is that Stata format is fully documented and therefore easy to work with and R also reads Stata files.
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Jens Lauritsen Coordinator and Initiator of the Epidata Project