Hi,
Personally I'd treat Table and Figures (Charts) differently. Unless your
tables are monsters, I think it's worth the effort of redoing them in
Word just because you have much more to play with in terms of formatting
(and autoformatting). A handy tip to keep them looking neat and tidy is
to follow the journal submission guidelines of a journal in your topic
area; most don't allow vertical lines, so you have to use blank space to
indicate column groupings - easily done by inserting blank columns and
removing the cell borders using the Format> Borders and Shading menu.
The Merge cells function allows you to combine cells across multiple
columns for your headers (although do this last as resizing columns
becomes tricky; or unmerge your cells, resize and remerge). In Table
Properties you can set the options for whether a table is allowed to
break over multiple pages, and set which headers to repeat if it does.
For a thesis, the chances are you'll be able to re-use the same table
layout a number of times and just change the values, so could be well
worth the initial effort.
For Figures, I'd agree with Dz to make as many changes in SPSS to get
the look right and then transfer to Word. Make sure you save your
originals in SPSS so if you need to make changes to fonts etc you can do
it at source and re-insert. As well as the usual cut 'n' paste, you
might consider exporting the Figures into separate image files (so you
have a separate back-up, and labelling them with the Figure title is
useful instead of Fig 1, 2 etc). If you select your figure, and go to
File>Export you can select to export the f'igures only' into various
graphics formats - .bmp and .png are the better ones for maintaining
quality if you need to resize once in Word. I'd recommend leaving Figure
titles off your figures in SPSS and using Word for this, then you can
index them using the Insert>Caption function and you'll be able to
produce your List of Figures for your contents page at the click of a
button.
Off topic slightly, but I'd also recommend backing up regularly. Sounds
obvious but easy to forget. If you've not seen DropBox
(www.dropbox.com), it's worth a look as it will automatically sync your
files from a nominated folder whenever you're connected to t'internet.
Even better if you work across multiple computers (e.g. your Uni office
Windows machine and your own Macbook) as it will sync between all
machines you install it on, so you always have access to your most
current version, even if you forget your trusty USB stick. You get 2GB
free and can get extra for recommending others, up to 3GB total. I'm not
on commission honest - I just wish I'd had something like it when I was
doing my thesis!
Hope that helps,
Brian Saxby
On 20/01/2010 05:47, Daniel Zahra wrote:
> Hi,
>
> For getting tables from SPSS into Word, I find if you fiddle with the options for charts in SPSS (Edit> Options> Pivot Tables tab> play around with formatting), and get the SPSS output looking how you want, it pastes across quite well into Word (2007) and only needs minimal formatting afterwards (namely table width being set to 17 so it doesn't break across the page).
>
> The downside being you'll have to re-run the analyses with the new table settings to change the output files.
>
> For big, whole page tables, I found pasting them to paint/paintshop/corel draw, saving them as images; inserting them into Word and just rotating the whole image works alright; so it fits as a landscape page
>
> And Sue; thanks for the heads up on Adobe Illustrator :)
>
> Dz
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Research of postgraduate psychologists. [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Elizabeth Gabe-Thomas [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 20 January 2010 11:24
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: more on chart problems
>
> Hi all,
>
> One option may be to export them into a PDF, then use a program which allows you edit pdfs. There are loads of free ones that you can download on the internet.
>
> Lizzi
>
> Elizabeth Gabe-Thomas
> PhD student /Demonstrator
> School of Psychology
> Link 3rd floor
> University of Plymouth
> Drake Circus
> Plymouth
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Research of postgraduate psychologists. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jamison-Powell, Susan
> Sent: 20 January 2010 11:10
> To:
> Subject: Re: more on chart problems
>
> Hi Caroline,
>
> SPSS charts are currently the bane of my life! My problem with them is that they are really poor quality when copied across. Luckily I am only using box pots etc so they are pretty straightforward graphs and therefore I am duplicating them in Adobe Illustrator to a much better graphical standard.
>
> Sorry - I don't have any alternative for you though. It would be so nice if different programs got along better!
>
> Sue
>
> ##################
> Sue Jamison-Powell
> Communications Officer
> Psychology Postgraduate Affairs Group
>
> http://www.psypag.co.uk
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Research of postgraduate psychologists. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Caroline
>> Wilson
>> Sent: 20 January 2010 11:06
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: more on chart problems
>>
>> I am currently finding it a chore to take tables out of SPSS output
>> (mostly 16 but some earlier) and transferring them in to Word documents
>> to write up my results.
>> What seems to work best so far is to copy into a single cell Word table
>> and fiddle about with them. I've come up with this following a mix of
>> advice in Nicola Brace et al's book (SPSS for psychologists : a guide to
>> data analysis using SPSS for Windows) and course I've been on about how
>> to handle tables in Word.
>>
>> It's still incredibly fiddly - especially if you want to edit out
>> columns or shrink some of the bigger tables so they'll fit on a single
>> side of A4.
>>
>> Has anyone got any good tips or guidance you could point me to? (I've
>> already tried the suggestion of transporting them via Excel but I just
>> found that even more time consuming).
>>
>> Many thanks
>>
>> Caroline Wilson
>> PhD student
>> De Montfort University
>>
> >
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