Thanks Steve, I do have StatTranfer 7 (love it, btw). I did as you suggested
below and it worked perfectly. The new options to create Stata, SAS, and
SPSS syntax files with separate ASCII data are very helpful.
Playing around with these options, I notice that SAS, like SPSS, also
appears to allow long variable labels (>240 characters)....
Thanks again,
Lee
Lee Sieswerda, Epidemiologist
Thunder Bay District Health Unit
[email protected]
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Dubnoff [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2003 10:55 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: st: length of a variable name
At 06:34 PM 7/15/2003 -0400, Lee Sieswerda wrote:
>I am working on this dataset with a number of other people, all of whom
>use SPSS, which has a much higher limit. I much prefer Stata, so I
>always convert the SPSS dataset to Stata format to work on it. However,
>the 80-character variable label limit means that when I convert back to
>SPSS format and send the altered dataset back to my colleagues, the
>variable labels are all truncated at 80 characters...I could work
>around this by re-labeling after I convert back to SPSS format, but
>with a couple of hundred variables, this is a pain in the neck.
In Stat/Transfer Version Seven, you can work around this problem by using
the new options to produce input programs plus ASCII data. First, produce
an SPSS program from your .sav file. Then move your data to a Stata .dta
file and do whatever transformations you want. When you are ready to go
back to SPSS, produce an SPSS program + data file from your Stata
dataset. Then clip the "VARIABLE LABELS" section from the first program
(the one dumped from SPSS) and paste it into the one dumped from
Stata. Not quite automatic, but better than doing it by hand.
Best,
Steve
----------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Dubnoff [email protected]
Circle Systems We make your data instantly usable.
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