The dupe of duplication

This note is written to serve as background and reference material for some of the data management courses (mainly session 5), developed by ICRAF. The note covers mainly the software currently used within ICRAF as a standard for data management, analysis and the writing of reports: Office 2000 and GenStat for Windows version 5 Service Pack 2 and version 6 Service Pack 1. A proper data management is important. Otherwise mistakes can be easily made, resulting in incorrect conclusions. You can build several strategies to prevent entering mistakes and to check for errors after data have been entered. When you now start to use this data set, it can be quite tempting to quickly copy and paste the data in one software package to produce summary statistics, to paste it in another software to plot some graphs and yet in another software to make a statistical analysis. If at a given moment you decide to work on a subset of the data or make some changes, you’ll end up with multiple copies of rather similar data and it is not easy to know which of the copies contain all original data and which copies have been modified. This note covers in detail how to import and how to link data between different software packages. It is a ‘how to’ that can be used in the compilation, querying and analysis phase of the project life cycle (see the research data management course notes).