Hello,
I am a newcomer to Epidata, so I apologize if my questions are not sophisticated. I am exploring the latest version and it is fantastic with many ingenious features, great work and great programming philosophy, thank you!
As the version is new, I understand that the documentation is not yet fully developed, and hence if someone can help me with these questions, I think they can be of use to many others as well.
What I want to do is to import a spreadsheet with field labels and data to Epidata. The spreasheet contains field names on the top row and records on the following rows. Once I have imported the initial data, I would like to ammend the records with additional fields, i.e. have the initial spreadsheet data as the seed data in records. I think this is a very normal practice to do, but I have run into several difficulties:
1. I have tried to import the spreadsheet with "File/Import file" but I don't seem to get it working. I have turned the spreasheet from Excel to CSV, but the dialogue box that opens doesn't recognize data. I made a workaround by copying a part of the spreadsheet and used "File/Import from clipboard" and that did work. The downside is that you have to do it part by part, and the fundamental problem is why it doesn't work in the first place. Is Epidata Manager very picky as to what field separators are used in CSV? I have tried changing field separators but with no luck. Clipboard seems to be the only workaround, but even still I have to do it in parts. (I am using Ubuntu and the latest Linux 64-bit version)
2. With the copy-paste method I noticed that Epidata was smartly able to interpret some fields with the right type (e.g. date, but not all date-fields, but I believe this is the issue of my spreadsheet), but not all. I have not discovered a way to change the field type afterwards, is it at all possible? The only hack I figured out was to manually change the field type in XML code directly, but I would be very hesitant to do it. If I touch XML code directly, will that mess up everything, or is it the simple fix to the problem?
3. Value-labels: My spreadsheet contains no value labels, obviously. It has for example field "Country of origin" and the value is string "Nepal". Is there a way for me to easily convert strings of text into value labels as a part of the import process? String values are consistent (the spreadsheet is an output file from a database), so I should imagine it would be possible do so.
4. Provided I get questions 1,2 and 3 adequately resolved, I should be fine with the initial data import. But what do I do if I want to later import additional records from the same spreadsheet structure to my Epidata project? Is this something that Append is supposed to do? There I have the same issue with the spreadsheet compatibility: The CSV file does not open in a recognisable way, hence I haven't been able to play around and test it either.
Help is much appreciated, thank you!
Pekka