[Limdep Nlogit List] data-reading error

[William Greene]

Colleagues:  Here is my general advice on dealing with Excel spreadsheet files.
The end result is that there is huge variance in these things. Sometimes they
are unreadable because they contain something completely unfamiliar.  I always
find that converting them to the old, bulletproof format solves the problems.
/Bill Greene

Katherine. I cannot discern how the file was originally made, but there are 
some nonsense codes in it that only Excel understands.  What I do when a 
file persistently acts like this is read it back into Excel (not 2007, unfortunately), 
then write it back out using Save As... and choosing the Excel 4.0 worksheet 
format. This is old, but reliable.  The transformed version of your data set is 
attached.  Here are the descriptive statistics. 
You should be able to do this with your other data sets. (By the way, #NAN# is 
Excels' code for "Not a number."  It's hard to know what it is, but nor is it 
a character string. It is, however, poison for statistical analysis. 
 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Philip A. Viton" <viton.1 at osu.edu>
To: limdep at limdep.itls.usyd.edu.au
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 1:32:14 PM (GMT-0500) America/Bogota
Subject: [Limdep Nlogit List] data-reading error 


If you'd like to put the excel files somewhere where we can grab 
them, I'm sure people would be willing to take a look. A file with 
3500 rows and 15 columns shouldn't be a problem: it's fairly small by 
anyone's standards.






------------------------
Philip A. Viton
City Planning, Ohio State University
275 West Woodruff Avenue, Columbus OH 43210
viton.1 at osu.edu

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-- 
Professor William Greene
Department of Economics
Stern School of Business
New York University
44 West 4th St., Rm. 7-78
New York, NY   10012
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~wgreene
212.998.0876