[Babase] Data entry switchover concerns
Karl O. Pinc
babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:02:20 -0500
Hi,
After everybody got off the phone Daphnie and I talked
a bit and the subject of switching over to the new
system came up in conjunction with data already
entered into the computer but not yet put into
Babase on Foxpro. There might be concerns.
Babase 2.0 will only take tab delimited plain text
(exported from Excel or whatever) as input. Apparently
there's data that's been entered in Foxpro but not
yet put into Babase and Daphnie says there might not
be time to get it into Foxpro before we run the
final conversion and go live with 2.0.
There is also apparently data coming from Amboseli
in electronic format.
Coordination is needed. I leave this to you folks.
We do have plans for converting the foxpro datasets
to tab delimited text for archival purposes. This
may be sufficient to get them into a format suitable
for entry into Babase 2.0, although you'd have to
figure out how you wanted to edit any datasets
that contain errors. You could use a text editor or
re-import them into Excel I suppose. I wouldn't
expect to see Babase 2.0 changing any of the
dataset input formats, in terms of what columns there
are and what goes in which column, so I suppose
this would work. Let me know if I need to think
more about this.
Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein