Pitfalls for users - Githubissues

psych-ds / psych-DS

Welcome to Psych-DS! If this is your first time visiting a Github repository, look to the left/down to the README (below the repository files.) Psych-DS is a specification for behavioral datasets - JSON-LD metadata, predictable directory structure, and machine-readable specifications for tabular datasets in behavioral research

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Pitfalls for users #20

Open mekline opened 5 years ago

mekline commented 5 years ago

I'm opening this issue to keep track of things that may stymie people as they are just beginning to use Psych-DS in the future. If something stymies you, mention it here! You can also add text to to the [How-To build a repository] page if relevant (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k3ZzAF8vrJeIcMN3q5g_l7WJtoybokvq5ueYVH0dcC8/edit#heading=h.w84ev4cs0qo7) draft.

mekline commented 5 years ago

Excel warnings: if you open a TSV (or CSV!) and then try to save it, Excel complains that you are using a format that will cause you to 'lose things' and strongly attempts to get you to use .xlsx instead. People are likely to click on the button which causes a format conversion. Now your nice simple TSV is a full-on Excel workbook! Instead, you should ignore these warnings, save as a TSV, and open your TSV in a text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, SublimeText) periodically to make sure you still have a plaintext file.

pederisager commented 4 years ago

Related to your comment about TSV in Excel, I am noticing a bunch of problems with .tsv files in projects where collaborators prefer working in Excel. Including:

Excel complains that formal will cause you to "loose" things
Excel does not want to open .tsv as a normal file unless you configure Excel in some way, or you figure out how to use the "text to columns" option in Excel.
Excel does not want to save files as .tsv. Even when you specify tab-separated file, Excel saves it as .txt
Excel does not let you exit a .tsv document without a "save as" rigmarole, EVEN IF you save the document right before closing.

In my opinion, I greatly underestimated how much harder .tsv is to work with - in a collaborative setting - than what .csv files are.