IDAMS and the year 2000        UNESCO International Training Seminar in 1999        Writing statistical reports - Real life example        Writing statistical reports - General scheme       IDAMS and the year 2000   The software. There are two places in IDAMS where the date is used. (i) The date is printed on the first page of each printout with the year occupying four digits. (ii) The IDAMS Run Documentation facility creates records with a date field of type YYMMDD where the year occupies two digits. In both cases, the year is taken from the PC system, and its correctness depends on the BIOS, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows 3.x and Windows 9x. Thus, your IDAMS is year 2000 compliant if the underlying PC system is year 2000 compliant, and it will provide a valid date in (i) and 00 in (ii). The IDAMS datasets. IDAMS datasets (created by users) where the year is represented by two digits may cause problems. However, this can be solved easily using the TRANS program to create an equivalent dataset in which variables "year" occupy four digits. Also, do not forget to modify and adapt your Recode statements where "year" is involved.           UNESCO International Training Seminar in 1999   The International Training Seminar: "Introduction to IDAMS" will take place from Monday 29 November to Friday 3 December 1999 at UNESCO Headquarters, Paris. During the basic part, from 29 November to 1 December, the overall structure of IDAMS, the editors, graphical facilities and other utilities offered by the package, and also the interface with micro CDS/ISIS will be presented. The Seminar is not meant to train participants in statistical techniques. Participants willing to extend their knowledge and/or perform more exercises could continue individual work on 2 and 3 December. The IDAMS development staff and computer rooms will remain at their disposal during this period. English will be the main language of this Seminar although explanations in French can also be provided. Training material will be available in both English and French. There is no registration fee, but all other costs (travel, board, lodging) are at the charge of participants. Applications can be submitted by mail, e-mail or by filling out the Registration Form. Applications submitted after the end of July 1999 will not be considered.           Writing statistical reports - Real life example   Joint use of CDS/ISIS, IDAMS, spreadsheet and text editor Problem formulation There is an ISIS data base, e.g. data base of IDAMS users, which contains such information as country name, region, type of institution, distributor (UNESCO or external), release/version of the software and the year of dispatching for each registered IDAMS user. Information about software dispatched is kept in a repeatable field with two subfields (release/version and year). A report had to be prepared on the number of copies of different versions of the software sent to each country, to each region, to each type of institution, number of copies sent per year, number of copies sent by external distributors, etc. Step 1 - Exporting data from ISIS data base to IDAMS CDS/ISIS - IDAMS Interface was used to extract necessary information from the data base and to construct IDAMS dataset. "Country name", "Region" and "Release/version" fields were recoded to numerical values. Repetitions were handled "case-wise", i.e. a separate record was constructed for each repetition. Thus, cases in the IDAMS dataset correspond to copies of the software distributed. Step 2 - Computation of univariate/bivariate tables TABLES program was used to obtain various univariate and bivariate distributions such as the number of copies of the software sent by region, type of receiving institution, year of dispatching, version and country for each region, etc. These distributions were saved in files, majority as IDAMS matrices and small part as printed output. Step 3 - Exporting analysis results for a report Printed results of analysis are stored in text files. As such, they can be inserted in any report and formatted using any text editor. However, distributions stored in matrix files can be handled in an easier and more elegant way. For that purpose, IMPEX program was used to transform IDAMS internal matrix format files to free format. Steps 4 and 5 - Inclusion of analysis results in a report Then these free format files were input directly to a spreadsheet software (here Excel) in order to format tables and prepare graphical presentation of results. Finally, all these formatted tables and figures were inserted in proper places in the report. Dear IDAMS Users, But what to do if data are not in an ISIS data base and some quite long alphabetic fields need to be analyzed using IDAMS? Have you any "tricky" solutions to propose? Are you willing to share your experiences in using IDAMS jointly with other software packages? If so, they could be published in IDAMS News.           Writing statistical reports - General scheme     Joint use of CDS/ISIS, IDAMS, spreadsheet and text editor (Shaded boxes and bold arrows indicate the route followed in the real life example)          IDAMS Newsletter Archives   Back to IDAMS menu     cii.webmaster@unesco.org © Copyright 1998 - UNESCO