Besides the data in the original Excel spreadsheet, this function needs clean headers to fill the answers with associated headings, questions and comments. It also needs to know how many rows contain the actual data (not any summary information at the bottom), and which columns are legitimately character data types whereas the rest of the columns it will attempt to convert to numeric. Finally an output directory can be optionally be specified to output diagnostic csvs for cleaning the data, especially for values that could not convert to numeric or ones that should be bound to a different numeric range (eg 0 or 1, not -1 to 11).
In future, all the necessary information would be contained in the header.
For instance, data_xslx is composed already of a clean headers_xlsx,
all summary information is removed so no need for row_end, and data type
along with acceptable range is appended to each answer heading, eg
County [chr] for character or score [int;0-5] for integer ranging from
0 to 5 and the default fields without attribution would be assumed to be
like answered [int;0,1] so only 0 or 1 is allowed.
tidy_poll(data_xlsx, headers_xlsx, row_end, cols_chr, dir_diagnostic_csvs = NULL)
| data_xlsx | input path to original poll data Excel spreadsheet |
|---|---|
| headers_xlsx | input path to cleaned headers Excel spreadsheet, with comments aligned to question and no in between text |
| row_end | last row of poll data in original Excel spreadsheet |
| cols_chr | vector of columns that are character |
| dir_diagnostic_csvs | directory to output diagnostic csvs (questions, answers, todo_data-not-numeric) |
tidy data frame