Thanks to Brian Ripley, Allesandra Cervino, Madeline Bauer, Andy Liaw,
Michael Axelrod, Don McQueen, and Robert Garrett for their helpful
suggestions.
Mostly people suggested exporting as comma delimited and using
read.table to import. This did not work - I get error messages
indicating a variable number of fields - (more on this below).
Several suggested recoding the blank data to some other data. Since the
Access database is not mine I could not do that in Access although it
would have been possible in Excel. One thing I did do in Excel is sort
the data on the sparse fields so that they were less sparse at the top
of the file. When this file was imported from the menu as an Excel file
it crashed Splus but I was able to successfully import it from the Excel
file via ODBC. This was the solution that worked.
Robert Garrett indicated that he successfully exports comma delimited
files from Access and imports them into Splus all the time. However, he
takes an intermediate step of "So I go in with an old ASCII editor
(WordPerfect DOS
PerfectEditor from 10 yrs ago!) and make sure any ",," is changed to ",
,",
and any ",<CR>" at a record end is ", <CR>". That usually does the
trick."
Unfortunately, I also find that many times there is no substitute for
an old ascii editor with a good search and replace function. I think
this is a sad commentary on modern software.
One final note on ODBC. I received one comment indicating that ODBC has
been effectively broken in Splus from the beginning. If this is so I
will have little hope of battling the SPSS tidal wave that will engulf
my organization. No one will have the patience or the technical
expertise to deal with problems like this and one bad experience with
Splus will doom any chance of wide acceptance.
****************************************
Michael Conklin
Sr. VP Analytic Services
Custom Research Inc.
8401 Golden Valley Rd
Minneapolis, MN 55427
mconklin@customresearch.com
612-542-0821 (Voice)
612-542-0864 (Fax)
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