On Fri, 8 Apr 2022, Summers, Peter wrote:
I'm getting some unexpected behavior with the stack() command.
The
attached spreadsheet has data structured as in the "by variable"
example on p. 23 of the user's guide. I followed the sample script
as on p. 24, except I opened the file as .xlsx and do the stacking
from v2..v13 since v1 is the country names. When I open the
spreadsheet, the "variables" v2, v3, etc have the correct column
information, but the resulting variables x1 and x2 aren't correct.
For example, x1 becomes integer-valued. I can't figure out what
I'm doing wrong here; suggestions welcome!
Peter, the content of your xlsx file is somewhat confusing. All of
the negative numerical values are marked as strings (see
xl/sharedStrings.xml inside stack_eg.xlsx when it's opened as a zip
file). I guess that's because they contain a unicode minus sign. Any
software that takes the string designation seriously (e.g. gretl,
gnumeric) is not going to treat these data as you were apparently
expecting.
Allin