SPSS Statistics 17 Extension Commands V - table merging and censoring

[Peck, Jon]

This is part five of a stroll through the new extension commands available for SPSS Statistics 17.  Today I want to introduce the new version of an old favorite: a programmability module that could merge tables in the Viewer and could censor selected cells in a pivot table based on cell statistics.

 

The old version of the tables.py module relied on Windows COM automation and required the installation of the win32com modules and some configuration work.  It was not available for SPSS 16 because of the architectural changes resulting from the rewrite of the entire user interface in Java.  (The old modules might work in SPSS Statistics 17 because of additional work done as part of that project, but I haven't tried them.)

 

Now, taking advantage of extension command improvements and the unification of programmability and scripting, I'm happy to announce

SPSSINC MERGE TABLES

and

SPSSINC CENSOR TABLES.

 

These are bundled in a single download from SPSS Developer Central (www.spss.com/devcentral), and are available now for Version 17.  The win32com extensions previously required are not used for this new version.  The Python Plug-In is.

 

SPSSINC MERGE TABLES was motivated by the need for merging the test statistics table in CTABLES into the body of the main table, but it can merge other types of tables as well.  For reasonably simple tables, the built-in functionality can do this without the user writing any Python code.  More complex tables require writing small Python functions to define how the rows and columns of the tables being merged line up.  There is as yet no dialog box interface for this command.

 

SPSSINC CENSOR TABLES can blank out or otherwise obscure selected cells in a pivot table based on values of cell statistics.  For example, you could blank out the mean statistics when the cell count is less than 5.  You could also blank out all the correlations in a correlation table that were not significant.  While this command can be used in situations where revealing a cell could undesirably disclose individual information, care must be used with totals.

 

This command has a dialog box interface that you can install from the download package.

 

For those of you who are considering venturing into creating extension commands and custom dialog boxes, I'd like to report that the task of creating the SPSSINC CENSOR TABLES extension command and its dialog box interface was a morning's work.  (The actual implementation of the censoring was already done.)  So go for it.

 

The MERGE TABLES package has been posted on Developer Central for a week or so although not announced.  However the package described here is newer, so you should get a new download if you want to take advantage of this.

 

As usual, these commands are provided under the SPSS Freeware License.  Comments in the Developer Central forums are welcome.

 

Finally, I've heard from a few users that this series of posts has been coming through as hexadecimal garbage.  This is a problem with the character encoding of email and the listserve when in digest mode.  If you have had this problem and would rather not read the hexadecimal versions of this series of emails, drop me a note, and I'll send more civilized versions.

 

Tomorrow, two more new extension commands tapping R procedures.

 

Jon K. Peck

SPSS Inc.

[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>

(ip) phone [phone]

 

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