Error importing CSV file in Sawtooth

Question

I want to import an orthogonal design from Excel (converted to CSV file) in Sawtooth. When I want to import this design, I get the error: There are an incorrect number of values on row 2. The file should have 8 values on each row. But , each row does contain 8 values (1. #version 2. #task 3. #concept and thereafter 5 attributes).

I have 5 attributes, 4 of them contain 4- levels and 1 attribute is a 2- level. There are 16 choice tasks, but with blocking, each respondent has to choose 8 times between 2 alternatives. Therefore I need 2 versions of the questionnaire.

But I am stuck with this error, does someone knows the answer???
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

A little late to answer this question, but I think it might be useful to others: I just ran into this problem and the solution above didn't work. What DID work however was the following little trick;

For unknown reasons some versions of windows (e.g. the Swiss / German) version of it have the bad habit to save CSV file not with commas "," but with semi-colons ";". While this seems not to be a source of problems for the majority of software, it IS a problem with Sawtooth.

In my case I simply exported the excel design into a .csv, then opened the .csv with wordpad (or any other text editor). A quick "search and replace" made the trick.

Hope this might help others in the future

Comments

thanks for the trick! Very helpful for non-english excel versions!

Answer 2

If the file 'looks' as if it is in the correct format then I would assume a non-visible character is interfering or SSI web doesn't know what to expect - so the steps I would immediately take would be:

1. Ensure the choice exercise is defined in SSI web (so same number of versions, questions, tasks, attributes and levels). If this is all in the expected format and import fails then ...
2. Try importing into Excel. Then as you might have a non-printing/visible character hanging about, try using the TRIM function to clean the data and then 'paste special values' into a new sheet - and export the new sheet as a csv file. Then try importing that.

If those steps fail then technical support!

Good luck.

Comments

Thanks for the answer! It worked!