Forcing a distribution to be numerical

[Andee Rubin]

I have an attribute with mostly numerical values, but one text value (“don’t know”), imported from a public dataset in CSV format.  I would like to have the variable treated as numerical so that the values are displayed to scale and I can do things like take an average.  What’s the best way to do that?  I had thought of deleting the text values, then changing the variable type to “numerical” but I’m not sure that will work if the numbers are already entered in text format.

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andee,

You may already know that you can change the way an attribute is treated on a given graph by clicking on the attribute name on the axis and choosing Treat as Numeric or Categorical if that’s the direction you’re going.

Alternatively, you can bring up the Attribute Properties dialog box and change the type of the attribute to numeric. This will have the effect that the non-numeric values will be ignored in any graphs you make and the attribute will be treated as numeric.

Bill

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