The trick with Excel is to make sure that each column of data should be formatted the same. If you have special characters or quotes in a string, this may cause problems. It may also be problematic to have commas in string fields.

What I do is this.

1. The first row has legal Epidata field names 2. Add a column at the end that has any field name and 1 in each cell 3. If you have missing data in the first row, add a row of dummy data just below the field names and make each cell look exactly like your data should. 4. Copy the entire data table, including field names

In Analysis:

read /cb save datafile

The read command will complain about the FIRST bad data element it finds. I use this as a cue to fix that cell and any others that may be like it.

Then you can drop dummy data and save the .rec again.

Jamie

On 2013-05-03, at 5:06 PM, epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca wrote:

I would like to format an xls file into .rec file. I save my xls file into csv file to open the latter in Epidata Analysis. It did not want to open my file. I found that there is some pb with string variables. I thought to fix all problems but now Windows close Epidata Analysis when I'm trying to open my .csv file. Can anybody help me? Candemum.