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Added section on proper encoding of variables in Excel. #5

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Nov 19, 2013
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Added section on proper encoding of variables in Excel. #5

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added section on encoding information with formatting instead of text…
nickreich Nov 18, 2013
3c092f0
update NR contribution.
nickreich Nov 18, 2013
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2 changes: 2 additions & 0 deletions README.md
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Expand Up @@ -131,6 +131,7 @@ In general, try to avoid coding categorical or ordinal variables as numbers. Whe
data, it should be "male" or "female". The ordinal values in the data set should be "poor", "fair", and "good" not 1, 2 ,3.
This will avoid potential mixups about which direction effects go and will help identify coding errors.

Always encode every piece of information about your observations using text. For example, if you are storing data in Excel and use a form of colored text or cell background formatting to indicate information about an observation ("red variable entries were observed in experiment 1.") then this information will not be exported (and will be lost!) when the data is exported as raw text. Every piece of data should be encoded as actual text that can be exported.

### The instruction list/script

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -184,5 +185,6 @@ Contributors

* [Jeff Leek](http://biostat.jhsph.edu/~jleek/) - Wrote the initial version.
* [L. Collado-Torres](http://bit.ly/LColladoTorres) - Fixed typos, added links.
* [Nick Reich](http://people.umass.edu/nick/) - Added tips on storing data as text.