[Bill Finzer]

Hello Heinrich,

CODAP has a pretty complete set of functions for manipulating dates and times as you can see in the enclosed screenshot.

Bill

Attachments:

1. 

   date_time_functions.png
   

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Kristyn,

Here’s a formula that will produce integers from zero to nine:

floor(random(0,10))

And if you want them to go from one to ten:

ceil(random(0,10))

Of course you can change the zero and ten to anything you want.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Traci,

Regarding freezing columns, I’m sorry to report there is no way to do this. A recently introduced feature to convert a case table into a case card might be helpful to you since it makes it much easier to work to work with a large number of attributes. But, then again, since you are also scrolling vertically, perhaps not.

Regarding hiding columns, there’s no interface for it. Sorry. There is a way to do it by editing the JSON text of the document, but I don’t think that is appropriate for either your situation or the situation you describe for students. We’ve received a number of requests for hiding columns through the interface and will likely provide it sometime soon.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hello Traci,

Excellent question, with what I hope you will find to be an excellent answer!

In the first screen capture on the left you see typical survey data with Smart Phone? coded with 1, 2, or blank. On the right you see the result of dragging that attribute all the way to the left to form a group for each value as shown on the right.

Fortunately, those values are editable! So, in the second screen capture on the left, you see the result of editing the 1’s to no and the 2’s to yes. Then, dragging the attribute back to the right flattens out the table again.

No formulas required! I hope this makes sense.

Bill

p.s. I think replacing the numbers with meaningful words is an excellent idea, no matter the age of the user.

Attachments:

1. 

   setup.png
   

2. 

   solution.png
   

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andee,

We’re not experiencing this problem here. Questions:

1. Is it one particular document that won’t save properly or do you find that no document can be saved?
2. When you attempt to save to Google Drive, do you see the ‘.codap’ file in your drive? If so, could you enclose it or give us a link to it?
3. Can you open Chrome’s inspector (Cmd-option-i) and see if anything is being written to the console that might be helpful to diagnosing the problem?

CODAP is working fine on all “modern” browsers as far as we know.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hello again,

I neglected to address the rationale. Thinking about the situation, there are two kinds of “cases”: states, and rates. Each state has a rate for each year, and each rate for a given year belongs to a certain state. This implies a hierarchy. Row by column structures are far from ideal for modeling hierarchies. CODAP allows you to create any number of levels, and this works very well for a surprising number of situations.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hello,

There’s a nice solution to this. Go to CODAP Data Interactives and scroll down to the Attribute Stacker.

1. Set things up so you can drag the “Embeddable Link” for the Attribute Stacker into your CODAP document. Having done so, the stacker will look like the first screen capture.
2. In the stacker, drag each of the year attributes into a slot on the right so that it looks like the second screen capture. Also, provide Year for a category name and Rate for a value name.
3. Press the Create a stacked data set button. This will give you a data set like the one in the third screen shot.

Notice that some of the values under Rate are not numbers. You may want to edit those values to be blanks so that making the graph shown in the final screen shot will be easier to make.

Notice that selecting a case at the state level selects all the points representing rates in the graph.

Thanks for the question. And I hope this helps.

Bill

 

Attachments:

1. 

   Stacker.png
   

2. 

   stacked.png
   

3. 

   newset.png
   

4. 

   graph.png
   

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Anna,

Thanks for the bug report!

I think this Help forum is a great place for feature requests ’cause then others can comment and/or +1 them.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andee,

Thanks for posting this. You’re right that that message shouldn’t be there. I think it’s a holdover from the early days when CODAP had problems downloading to a local file in Safari. I’ll make sure that this is logged as a bug.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Cristián,

Thanks for your sleuthing this. I’m still not able to reproduce it, but I’m on OS X 13.4, so that might make a difference. I’m going to ask our QA to try to reproduce. And I’ll ask Jonathan, our lead engineer, to investigate further.

Thanks for your help and patience,

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hello Cristián,

I’m not able to reproduce this error with either the Spanish or English versions. There is now a more recent build (0440) than the one on which you experienced the problem (0438), so perhaps something got fixed?

Please try again in 0440. If you still can reproduce the error,

1. What browser are you running?
2. What operating system?

Thanks for reporting the problem!

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Good morning Meggie,

You will need to download the data from google sheets as a comma separated values (csv) file. Then you can drag it from your desktop into a CODAP document window or use the Import command from the “hamburger” menu in the upper-left corner of the CODAP window.

Hope this helps,

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi again Joachim,

I’m very glad you followed up with this question because both Dan and I forgot to mention a critical detail!

Once you have shared a document, if you save it locally, you will want to check the box “Include sharing information in downloaded file.” (This happens automatically if you are saving to Google Docs.) If you fail to check this, then when you next open your saved document, it won’t have remembered that you have previously saved it and will create a new shared copy.

Could that explain what you were seeing? (I hope so!)

Bill

Attachments:

1. 

   SaveAs.png
   

[Bill Finzer]

Hello Joachim,

When you are sharing a CODAP document, you can think of the original document as the master from which all shared copies will derive. It’s the document that generates the unique ID for shared copies. It’s usually a good idea to keep this master document somewhere where you’ll be able to find it again.

If you modify the master document, you can Update shared view either in the “hamburger” menu or in the Get link to shared view dialog box. Updating will mean that the next time someone uses the shared link they will get a document with your modifications.

I think that in your situation you are modifying a shared view (a copy) of your original document. It’s now an independent CODAP document that has lost all connection to the original “master” document. Sharing this copy will start the process all over again. Changes to this copy followed by an update will not affect shared views of the original master document.

The only way to affect the shared views of your original document is to go back to that original, change it, and update the shared view from there.

You ask if it is possible to stop sharing a document. Yes! In your original document, go to the Get link to shared view dialog box where you will find a Stop sharing link in the upper-right of the dialog box.

I know this is kind of tricky, but it does work well once you get the idea that there is a master document that rules them all.

Hope this helps,

Bill

p.s. And I just saw Dan’s much more succinct reply to your question. Between the two of us I think we’ve covered it all.

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Cristián,

This is a really interesting discussion topic. In fact, in a Data Science Games project meeting today we were grappling with exactly this issue. Tim Erickson is drafting a discussion paper about it and has agreed that others are welcome to read it here.

Let us know what you think and in particular whether it it helps you with the conceptual question of when one needs to create a parent table.

Bill

[Author]

Posts