Import / Export Functions and other features missing for academic and office use in urban planning

[Roman Seidl]

Dear PSPP users/developers,

as SPSS is much too expensive for any normal use and they have abandoned
any campus licensing (probably they don't want new customers) we are
evaluating alternatives.

Last semester a student of mine did an evaluation of PSPP (s.
http://openplanningtools.org/Statistik%20mit%20PSPP - in German -
linking this page is welcome if you find it of interest). 

The main problem of PSPP in our use is the limited import and export
capabilities. Rather than needing sav or por file formats which not of
any interest when not using spss we would need for things like dbf, xls
and maybe odt. Aren't there some GPLed libraries somewhere which could
be easily integrated?

Is anybody having the same problems? 

The second most annoying thing was PSPP's behavior to not warn you when
you open another file when there is an unsaved dataset. This will lead
to mistakes...

Having better import/export possibilities and a warning when opening
another dataset if the current one is modified would make pspp equal to
better for our use. So pspp is already a great product - there is only a
few details missing.

Best regards
roman