# The Simfit/Excel interface

Abstract

If your data are in the Microsoft Office spreadsheet Excel you may wish to analyse them using Simfit, and there are three ways this can be done. You can copy and paste using the clipboard, you can write out a table in ASCII comma delimited format to a file, or you can use the Excel macros (called simfit?.xls) distributed with Simfit. In each case you start in the same way by collecting together the data columns of interest into a contiguous, selected (i.e. highlighted) block. Note that this block can only have missing values or text labels if you intend to use the Simfit program MAKSIM to create a Simfit file, and then the text must have no spaces in labels. Excel uses tabs to ensure that text like Date of Birth can represent a single cell, but Simfit regards spaces and commas as separators, so you have to use labels like Date-of-Birth or similar.

Method 1: Using the clipboard

Copy the selected table to the clipboard and then either paste it into the Simfit program when asked for data input, or paste it into program MAKSIM to create a data file.

Method 2: Creating ASCII files

Copy the selected table to a comma delimited ASCII file, but before this can be read into Simfit it must be processed by program MAKSIM in order to create a Simfit data file.

Method 3: Using the Simfit Excel macros

You will have to investigate the macros (simfit?.xls) supplied with Simfit to find one that works for your puroposes. There are several macros for the alternative versions of Microsoft Office, and there are variants with different functions. It is necessay to open a simfit?.xls macro before selecting a data table for writing to a file. Then, after selecting an Excel table, you open the appropriate macro from Excel by selecting the Tools options then the macro required to create a correctly formatted file (if the table is consistent).

Advice

- Simfit files have a header (title then number of rows and columns) and a trailer (details about the data) but you never include these in the table selected. Such details are added automatically when clipboard data is pasted into Simfit, when a table is processed by MAKSIM, or when the macros are used.
- To analyse a sample for statistics or to create a pie chart you only need to select a single column.
- To compare samples or do 1-way analysis of variance you create a file with a matrix if all columns are the same length. Otherwise you create a file for each column, then you create a library file (using program MAKLIB) to reference the column files required.
- To do a Fisher exact or chi-square test, or estimate multiple correlations or plot a bar chart you select a rectangular matrix. To add error bars to a bar chart you write out a rectangular matrix of errors to be added, corresponding to the rectangular matrix of bar heights.
- To do curve fitting or plotting you select the first column (in increasing order) as the independent variable and the second column as the dependent variable. Note that the macros can be used to make sure that column 1 is in increasing order.
- Advanced users may wish to add a final column of weights to curve fitting data tables, or they may wish to prepare plotting files with error bars by having the low, middle then upper error bar values in columns 2, 3 and 4. Note that the macros can be used to check that selected columns only contain positive values.
- Very advanced users will appreciate that the macros can be used to create special Simfit files, like the files for fitting functions of several variables or for plotting advanced pie or bar charts.

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