TPL
Tables
TPL Tables is
a powerful and flexible cross tabulation system used for both data
analysis and publication. It automatically produces professional
quality tables in PostScript and HTML.
Powerful
Tabulation Engine
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Nesting
-- Allows an unlimited number of levels or dimensions. For example,
your table could show unemployed people by gender by
race by age by marital status. |
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Concatenation
-- Allows you to simultaneously tabulate many different items
and show them in a single table. Your table could show both
the number of employees and the average salary for industry
then age then gender then race then
marital status. |
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Layering
-- Allows you to produce a table and then layer it by numerous
factors. For example, you could repeat the same table for each
region of the country. |
In addition
to structuring tables, you can also use TPL Tables to:
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Compute
new variables and statistics |
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Group
values into ranges or other categories of your choice (i.e.,
group states into regions or incomes into ranges) |
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Select
data with the characteristics that interest you (i.e., age less
than 30, income greater than $50,000, or both together) |
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Include
totals, subtotals and percent distributions |
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Calculate
medians, percentiles, deciles, and other quantiles |
Extensive
Formatting Options
TPL Tables has
extensive formatting options that make it easy for you to both present
your tables in an easy-to-read format and conform to those pesky
publication requirements. You control table structure and content
by choosing your own settings for:
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Page
breaks, orientation and paper size |
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Color
of text, lines and data |
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Labels,
titles, footnotes, page numbers and table placement |
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Column
widths |
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Label
break points |
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Data
value formats, including currency signs, percent signs, commas
and decimals |
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Placement
and thickness of lines |
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Type
sizes and styles |
Features
in Version 8.0
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Character Variables
If a data field contains non-numeric characters and has too many different values
to be a useful control variable, it is classed as a character variable. Many chara
cter variables have internal structure. For example a date field may have month, day and ye
ar subfields. If the subfields are in fixed locations within the field, then the SUBSTRING function may be used to separate them. If the subfieds have markers to s
eparate them, then the new CHAR SPLIT command can be used.
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Rule Formatting
Several new format statements have been added to enable individual rules to be modified. With the new features you can change the color and weight of individual rules. You can also control whether the rules are solid, doubled, dashed, or dotted.
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Export Options
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Spreadsheet (xls, ods)
TPL now directly supports a form of the old Microsoft xls spreadsheet format and the new current international
standard ods format which is supported by all current spreadsheet programs.
TPL ods export preserves much of the formatting of a TPL table while retaining
the distinction between numeric and non-numeric fields and the precision of the
numeric fields. |
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Webpage(html)
TPL support for html has been vastly improved. Webpages produced from TPL
very closely resemble the original pages. There are options to use the original
page size or to take advantage of the unlimited size of a webpage by expanding the
page size so that page breaks are never caused by the length or width of the "paper".
Page navigation bars remain at the top of a page when the page is scrolled. |
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Text Tables(txt)
In older versions of TPL, the command POSTSCRIPT = YES/NO; was used to
produce tables in a text mode (ASCII) with a fix-width and size font or a graphics
mode with varying fonts, colors, etc. Different commands were supported in the
different modes. A text mode table could not be edited in Ted. In version 8
of TPL, there is only one mode. Text Tables are an export option. So you can
use whatever commands you want and you can edit the table in Ted. If you want
a text table, you can then just export it. If you don't like the appearance, you can
use Ted to continue editing it until it is what you want. |
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Data Table(dat)
A data table is a table which has been modified so that it can be used as data
rather than for display. In older versions of TPL, it was produced by the command
DATA TABLES; Since a Data Table is a form of Text Table it had the same awkwardness
to work with as a Text Table. Now, instead of using the DATA TABLE
command, you can just export the table as a Data Table. |
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Other New Features
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TPL ODBC can now access a database with more than 100 tables.
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TPL ODBC can now support schemas. |
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Longer html links are now supported in format statements. |
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In Windows, TPL now provides better control of which tables or pages are exported. |
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TPL provides improved handing of exported tables when fonts are not available on your machine. |
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In UNIX, TPL jobs may use the -Q argument to access Oracle when a database name is not
required. |
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In TED, data values may now be placed in text masks associated with observation variables. |
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In Table Builder, REPLACE statement is now implemented. |
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Using TED, metadata such as author may be placed in a new PDF. |
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In Table Builder, holding the cursor over some controls will cause help comments (tool tips) to appear. |
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Codebook Abstract now reports on footnotes created in the codebook.
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Features in Version 7.0
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Data
Drilling (Windows Only)
In Ted,
select table cells of interest and use the data drill option.
You will then be asked to select which fields you wish to
display. TPL will create a report of the individual records
which contributed to the selected cells showing the selected
fields. The feature is useful for finding errors in your data
file or in finding individual records in your data which are
of special interest.
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Define
on Multiple Variables
Defines can be done on multiple variables using language similar
to a conditional compute.
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Rank
on Value
A
new format statement, RANK ON VALUE, has been added. Rather
than rearranging rows as with the Rank statement in the table
request, this statement just replaces the value in a cell
with its rank number. This feature enables you to create a
single table containing separate rankings on multiple variables.
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Statistical
Testing (Windows only)
Statistical tests such as t-tests Chi squared and anova can
now be performed on parts of a table. |
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Percent
Change
The Percent Change and Numeric Change statements create new
observation variables which can be used in table statements.
Specification of the statements requires 2 On variables, an
observation variable and a control variable. The changes that
appear in the table are the change in the On Observation value
that occur when you move from one condition of the On Control
variable to the next. |
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Percents
Several new options have been added to the percent language
to make adding percents to a table easier. Also, percents may
now be added to a table in Table Builder |
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Other
New Features
Interactive Environment |
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Ted
now has an unlimited level UNDO option. This is especially
useful for balancing banked tables and removing the changes
made by statistical tests. |
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In
Table Builder, when windows are expanded, list of variables
and conditions are also expanded so more items can be
seen. |
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TPL,
Ted, Codebook Builder, and Table Builder have the option
to display the combined Help rather than just the Help
for the particular program. |
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In
Table Builder, a user can now reorder the terms in a quantile
statement. |
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For database jobs, if a password is not required, there
is no prompt. |
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The
instructions which come up at the start of TPL, TED, Codebook
Builder, and Table Builder now have buttons to do the
most common actions. |
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Table
requests can be run from within Table Builder. |
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In
Codebook Builder, binary data types can be specified as
signed or unsigned. |
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In
Table Builder, Ted, and Codebook Builder, holding the
right mouse button down over a variable or symbol will
display the full name of the variable or symbol in a box
next to the item. New |
Language Features |
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Some
table request may specify that column 3 should be the
difference between columns 1 and 2. Because of rounding
errors, the displayed results may not match perfectly.
The new post compute function DISPLAY specifies that a
term in a post compute be rounded to its displayed value
before a calculation is performed. This prevents the problem.
DISPLAY is actually an undocumented feature in V6 TPL
rather than a new feature in V7. |
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SUP and SUB now affect the vertical alignment of footnote
symbols. |
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Post Computes no longer require a variable. You can now
write POST COMPUTE CONSTANT = 3; Before, to get a constant
value in a request, you would need something like POST
COMPUTE CONSTANT = 3 + 0 * COUNT; |
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A
new format statement has been added to specify the properties
of a bank divider. |
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Page
markers now retain their original size when a table is
scaled. |
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Alternate Quantile and Median statements have been added
to TPL. These statements use a fixed interval range rather
than the logarithmic range used by the standard Quantile
and Median statements. |
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An option is available to suppress the often long list
of printed rows in the output file. |
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STDEV, STDERR, and VAR can now use weighting variables.
In earlier versions of TPL, only MEAN supported weights |
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An
empty ("") field in a CSV file is now treated as a Null
value. |
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Footnote text and other properties of footnotes can now
be specified at the table level. Before they could only
be specified for an entire request. If FOOTNOTES EACH
WAFER is specified, footnote text and properties can be
specified for individual wafers. Export |
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HTML
Links and Anchors can now be specified for masks and labels. |
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Ted supports specifying the divide character in CSV export.
There is also a script option in Windows and Unix for
this. |
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Line
skips are retained when tables are exported to HTML. |
Scripts
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A
codebook name can be passed to TPL either as a command
line argument or in a script. This, combined with the
use of MERGE in a datalist, allows a table to be created
from multiple files with the same field names but different
formats. |
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Users
can now write scripts which pass multiple tables to change
into eps files. In earlier versions of TPL, the eps files
would overlay each other because they had common names.
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Scripts
options have been added to support export of tables to
pdf format. |
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Features
in Version 6.0
New
Input and Output Options
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CSV input
files -- CSV (comma separated values) and other types of delimited
files can now be used as input. Creating new codebooks for delimited
files is quick and easy with the wizard-like interface in Codebook
Builder. If the first line of data has variable names, you can
choose to have them automatically used as the variable names
in the codebook. |
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CSV output
files -- Outputs can be exported as CSV files. |
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Tables
can be exported in pdf format from within TPL |
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Tables
can be exported in PC-Axis format. The PC-Axis family consists
of a number of programs for the Windows and Internet environment.
PC-Axis is aimed at any organization interested in publishing
tabular statistical data, and is used by a number of Statistical
Offices in different countries to let their users retrieve statistics. |
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Major enhancements
have been made to HTML output. These include:
* HTML can be exported in CSS (cascading style sheets) format
with style names that describe table parts.
* Stub indentation more closely matches the table as displayed
in Ted. Stub continuation and stub increment work.
* All other label alignment and spacing options now work also.
Labels with multiple alignments will retain these alignments.
* Label wrapping matches the table as displayed in Ted.
* There are no extra rules in stubs.
* Shading is supported for of all or parts of a table.
* End users can scale tables in all commonly used browsers.
* There is an Excel option for better display in Excel.
* The Autosize option allows an entire table to fit in a single
html page (no automatic banking or skipping to a new page because
the table is too long).
* Table cells are now aligned based on mask (decimal points
line up). |
New
Functions
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Row
Banking -- allows narrow tables to be broken at the bottom of
a page, or after a selected row, and "wrapped" to the top of
the page so that the sections (banks) are displayed side by
side. |
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Statements
have been added for built-in statistical functions so that you
do not need to enter the formulas with Computes and Post Computes.
* MEAN weighted or unweighted
* VAR - variance of sample (n - 1)
* VARP - variance of whole population (n)
* STDERR - standard error of means
* STDEV - standard deviation of sample (n - 1)
* STDEVP - standard deviation of whole population (n) |
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Ranking
-- Table rows can be ranked (sorted) based on the values in
a selected data column. Different groups or rows can be ranked
differently. The ranking can be descending or ascending. Optionally,
a rank column can be added to the table to display the rank
number for each row. Another option lets you keep only the top
(or bottom) n rows for a particular ranking. With this option,
you can request a row to display the residual. |
Other
New Features
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Table requests
are no longer limited to 2 billion potential cells. |
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PostScript
tables can now be scaled so that more rows and columns will
fit on a page. This gives much finer control than you can get
by changing font sizes. |
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Comments
are now retained in approximately their original location for
both table requests and format statements even when the requests
are generated by an external editor. |
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A new quick
label editor has been added to Ted, Table Builder, and Codebook
builder. You can add simple text in the box or, if you are familiar
with the syntax of TPL labels, you can enter entire labels using
label grammar. The label entries are checked for validity. |
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If you
have a Postscript printer, you can now print directly to it
in Ted instead of going through the normal print conversions.
This produces more accurate output especially for scaled tables. |
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Table
Builder now supports simpler select, compute, and post compute
windows for less experienced users. |
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Multiple
TPL jobs can be run simultaneously on a single machine. A locking
mechanism has been added to assure the jobs do not interfere
with each other. |
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For organizations
where users are not free to modify their Windows directories
(e.g. c:\winnt or c:\windows) the tpl.ini file can be stored
in some other location.
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Building
Codebooks -- A new Unix program called tpl conditions can be
used to assist in building codebooks for any type of data that
can be used with TPL. It converts partial codebook sources into
complete codebook sources, creating condition value lists based
on the values in the data. In doing so, it saves you work in
creating codebooks and also assures that the codebook source
accurately describes the data. The program can also be used
to update a codebook source when the data has changed in such
a way that additional condition values are needed. This new
program replaces the old codebook generator that could only
be used with sequential fixed width data files. |
Features
New to Version 5.2
Accessible
HTML Table Output Meets Section 508 Standards
You can request HTML output in a format that can be used by visually
impaired persons. The HTML meets the standards of Section 508 of
the Americans with Disabilities Act which requires that U.S. government
web sites be accessible. The new JAWS reader software works successfully
with TPL HTML output. Sample
accessible table.
Tabulation Features
A new rounding option has been added to provide a choice between
rounding data values up and rounding them according to the "round
even" rule.
When there are multiple tables in a table request, data selection
can now be applied on a table by table basis so that different subsets
of the data can more easily be selected for different tables.
Computations that take place after tabulation, called Post Computes,
can now reference variables created by other Post Computes. This
can greatly simplify some computations.
Format Features
Page Markers can contain a count of the number of pages in the table
output so that pages can be labeled with both the individual page
number and the count, for example Page 3 of 10.
Specific
instances of a label, for example on a particular row or column
of a table, can be replaced without affecting other instances of
the label. This eliminates the need to have different sets of labels
for unique and unusual situations.
You
can control the minimum number of dots displayed as the dot leader
for stub labels on rows with data.
Label
Lists (for TPL-SQL databases)
For category variables, lists of value/label pairs can be loaded
into databases. Now, instead of containing only simple text, the
labels can contain any of TPL's advanced label formatting features,
for example font choices, indentations, and line breaks.
TPL Scripts
for Batch Jobs (Windows version)
TPL scripts can be run in background with job status displayed on
the task bar. This means that work can be done in other applications
while large batches of TPL jobs are running.
Wild cards (* and ?) can be used in script lines for TED so that
fewer commands are required.
The CHDIR command in scripts now applies to TED as well as to other
commands, so there is no need to provide full paths for files in
TED commands.
New arguments for TED let you choose the core file names and destination
locations for exported files such as HTML and Encapsulated PostScript.
Interactive
Features
(Windows version)
In addition to the Format Features listed elsewhere:
To speed up interactive editing of PostScript tables in TED, the
TPL editor, many new features have been added to give detailed control
of items to be changed. For example, instead of editing column by
column, you can click or otherwise select multiple specific columns
or ranges of columns to change the column width.
In the label editor, cut and paste can be used and special (non-keyboard)
characters can be pasted from the Windows Character Map or entered
with the numeric keypad.
In menus for running jobs, there is a new menu to let you set file
extensions so that when you browse for files you will initially
see only the files that are suitable for the particular situation.
Features New to Version 5.1.6
Subfields
(for TPL-SQL databases)
Subfields let you describe variables that are subparts of
variables in your database. In non-database codebooks, this
functionality is provided by Redefine. Examples of variables
that could be divided into subfields are codes such as a commodity
or industry codes where the first digit of the code gives
a major category and additional digits provide additional
detail.
Codebook
Builder
(Windows version)
For ODBC databases, Codebook Builder has been optimized to
speed up processing of condition values, both in creating
codebooks and in checking the condition values for old codebooks.
The change can result in huge reductions in processing time
for large databases that have control variables.
Codebook
Builder and Table Builder
(Windows version)
In Codebook Builder, when getting or editing conditions (unique
values) for a control variable, a count of the number of conditions
is displayed on the screen. In Table Builder, this count is
shown on the "About var-name" screen when control
variable information is displayed.
HTML
Output
In exported HTML tables, you can control alignment in data
cells by using TEXT masks. For regular masks, the data are
still right-aligned to maintain alignment of decimal positions.
For multi-page tables, there are additional footnote controls.
You can request that footnotes be displayed at the bottom
of each page rather than only on the last page of the table
and delete the built-in footnote that says, "See footnotes
at end of table.".
TPL
Scripts for Running Batch Jobs
(Windows version)
You can now set up a script with % substitution arguments.
These substitutions let you run the same sequence of jobs
for different files by passing file names, or parts of file
names, to be substituted in the script.
For ODBC databases, new arguments let you specify ODBC database
information in a script so that you can run the script without
being prompted for the ODBC Data Source, user name, or password.
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