Hi,

Before I ran participants through my Media Lab experiment I conducted a final test of the experiment on each of the lab computers to be sure that everything was working appropriately. I just went through the first few questionnaires and then terminated the experiment.

I just noticed that the Excel file (in Excel 2007) did not record all of the variable names but did record all of the responses. So there are many columns in the Excel file that do not have variable names in the first row. It looks like the variable names discontinued right around where I stopped my initial tests and I wonder if this is because the first run-through is the only time that Media Lab writes variable names to the Excel file.

I tried the SPSS syntax file but it does not work - data appear in columns they shouldn't. I'm guessing this is because I have variable names that are greater than 8 characters long. I would like to keep those names the way they are (and I am using a newer version of SPSS that supports long variable names), so it looks like the SPSS syntax is not the best option.

What would be the best way to get those variable names back into the Excel file? Is it as simple as deleting the Excel file, and then running through the entire study to force Media lab into creating all variable names in the Excel file? Then copy the row of variable names into the real Excel data set? Is there any problem doing it this way? For example, is it a problem if I have randomization in the experiment?

Thanks for your help.

Ed