Pedro,

Pedro Emmanuel Brasil wrote:

Hello all,

As times goes by, Im getting the idea that data entry is an art more then a science. Many ptojects have to keep a lot of fields in the paper form and at the end the paper is not big enough to have them all. The consequence is that the QES file should be as similar as possible with paper forms. These last couple weeks Im tryin to make a QES file with tow columns but I cant get to straight up the second column in the REC file. When I make the QES I line up the second by hand, since menu EDIT\line field comand seems to work fine only with one column. But whe the REC file generated the variables, labels and filds of the second column are not align as the QES file (sometimes the labels are uncomplete).

<Snip>

The most amazing to me is that I´ve worked on some QES files with tow columns before and sometimes it works fine and sometimes it just does not work. At this file for example, a few segments work fine and some dont. Any tip to work around this matter?

Thank you,

Pedro Emmanuel Brasil

in my experience the biggest problem with defining more than one variable per line in Epidata Entry is that you can not fully control the variable naming - i.e you might have to apply meaningfull names to the defined variables afterwards.

Apart from that, my recommendation is the same as Jamies: use a fixed width font (I use Thinfix, 9 pt.) in both editor and `show data form'. If you have to distribute the entry form to other users, you might want to distribute a copy of the 'epidata.ini' file, which is preset with the desired options, along with the rest of the files.

You might find the data entry forms defined in relation to the Family Finder Project relevant:

http://www.stat.sdu.dk/familyfinder ==> FF Data Entry

The data entry form is designed with multiple variables per line.

-- Jesper K. Hansen