Although I am not familiar with the policy of ESA on data papers, I wonder if the situation you describe is correct. Research involves both collecting data and analysing it, and it sounds as though your spreadsheets include both the raw data and at least part of the analysis. Do the analysis portions - namely the formulae - really have to be published in ASCII form? Many ecologists use proprietary software for data analysis, and if they have to translate all their analyses into a standard form, that seems to pose a formidible obstacle to publication.
If instead of doing the analysis in Excel you imported the data into a program like SAS or SPSS, or a special package that you programmed yourself, what would the requirements be? Bill Silvert ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Inouye" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU> Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 5:56 PM Subject: archiving data files - question about Excel >I have a large number (900+) of Excel spreadsheets from a 30-year > (and ongoing) study of flowering phenology from the Rocky Mountain > Biological Laboratory, with each spreadsheet including data from one > 2x2 plot that was surveyed every other day for the growing season. To > publish these data as an ESA data paper they have to be converted to > ASCII, as no proprietary formats are accepted. I can understand > this, having already been caught by having a program (SuperCalc) that > I used for data storage for this project go extinct. However, some > cells in the spreadsheets are formulae (frequency distributions of > the number of flowers open per inflorescence), and when I save the > spreadsheet as a .txt file just the value, and not the formula, is > exported. > > My recollection is that SuperCalc had a way to export a list of all > non-blank cells (A1, A2, ...., B1, B2, .....) and what their contents > were, including formulae, but I can't find an easy way to do this > with Excel. I would also like a list of all the comments I have > associated with cells, and their cell references. Any ideas about how > best to generate this ASCII list? I'm envisioning two results for > each spreadsheet: first a version showing the spreadsheet as > displayed on the screen (the .txt export will do this, although there > are some formatting issues, so I may explore a .prn option), and > second, a list of all the cells, or at least those with formulae or > comments, and the formulae or comments from those cells. > > I will probably also archive the files in their original Excel > format, at the digital repository that our campus library has > created. That way, as long as Excel or some program that can read > its files is available, researchers could access the spreadsheets > without having to reverse the process I'm trying to institute. > > > David Inouye >
