Hi,
I've been following this project for a number of years, and even though I've hardly talked to any of you devs, I've been hoping for some time for the project to mature.
From the date I first laid eye, obviously a LOT has improved. However, for me to really feel that the software reaches a state where I'd actually consider it properly (instead of just downloading to see how it progresses), there are at least 3 major functions that needs to be addressed (hence this e-mail is sent hoping that someone will actually address them.
No 1 - Office
The interoperability with Microsoft Office is lousy at best. Looking at SPSS, when you have an output and copy it from SPSS and paste in Excel, it'll instantly look decent (except for my personal preference of not liking merged cells but despite that). It'll be structured in a logical way. Doing the same from PSPP will give you something which really is as far as possible away from what any user would want. I can't really tell how SPSS is doing it but I can tell that any output produced from PSPP will be moved, and not by typing the information manually number by number to Excel.
No 2 - Tables
This is something that possibly won't affect all, but I personally have always favored the tables command over other commands such as Ctables.
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/spssstat/v20r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.spss.statistics.help%2Fsyn_tables.htm
I personally believe it gives me the output I need faster and better than any optional approach.
No 3 - Merge files
This is something I belive is in place by script, but I would appreciate it on the menu as well, as it's typically something that I use from the menu (like many other features) ....
Obivously there are a lot of other nice to have features that isn't there (eg: the ability to choose in preferences to display variable names instead of variable labels in command boxes, Two step cluster, aggregate etc) but the top 3 would really be a huge leap forward...
Hope to see them implemented and I'd like to thank you on the great work you all put in.
Cheers,
F