For the first year or so using WinCross, I did not take advantage of the Create Projects option in the file menu. I’m not sure why. But now creating a project is one of the first things I do when I set up a job.
“Create Project” pairs the current job and it’s corresponding datafile so you can easily access them again. Then the next time you want to open that job, all you have to do is click the green file folder to Open your project.
Here is how you can take advantage of Create Project:
- Open Job file
- Open Data file (that corresponds with Job file)
- Click File then Create Project…
- Type Unique Project name in the Create Project dialog box
- Click Save
Now you are ready to go!
Now you won’t have to navigate to the job file and data file every single time you want to work on that study. You can just click on the project from one central area, and let WinCross get it for you.
Here are some of the things I do to make this work easier:
I keep the same name for the job’s dataset, for example the dataset for jobname.job is called jobnamedata.sav. So if we are still in field, every time I update the data, I make sure to save the new dataset over the old dataset, newjobnamedata.sav would be saved over jobnamedata.sav. If I need different crosstab versions of the data, I will either temporarily open the new dataset OR I will create a new Project mapping the new dataset name to the old job name. And, of course, I always keep a back up of my data!
If I change the name of my dataset, I will save over the previous project by using the same exact name I originally used in the Create Project dialog box (instead of Typing a Unique Project name in the Create Project dialog box).
Do you create projects in WinCross? Why or why not?
