Reformatting data.. Help a LSU grad student!
 

Here's the break-down:

I'm a grad student at LSU working with deer....

I caught a bunch of deer and put tracking devices on them. I've followed
them around for 1-2 years depending on the deer.

Thus, I have a data file for each deer that list all the dates in which I
located the animal:

Date1
Date2
Date3
.....Date228


In one of my analysis I am estimating the probability of an animal surviving
through the year or season.....
To do this, I am using Program MARK -

Program MARK uses 'encounter histories' to do this...

Thus....my data (from above) must be reformatted into an 'encounter history'
.......

with '10' meaning the animal was alive when i located it.

Thus, the above data set should then look like:

101010.......10

So, is there anyway that I can convert a list of dates (in the format
12312009) into one line of an 'encounter history'???
Can excel string together a '10' for every cell that was being used (had a
date in it)............?

Otherwise, I've got 48 deer with 200+ encounters each....... I'm looking at
manually entering ten-thousand '10''s.

Any ideas??

Any help would be much appreciated...

Thanks -

Justin

Reformatting data.. Help a LSU grad student!
 

Maybe something like this?
In B1: =REPT(10,COUNT(A:A))
where col A houses real dates
will produce the required string: 101010.......10

You might need to convert the "dates" in col A if they are text dates, to
real dates. This can be done at one go by selecting col A, then clicking Data
Text to columns. Click NextNext, and in step 3, under Col data format,
check "Date" & choose: MDY from the droplist, then Finish.
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---
"Justintime99" wrote:
Here's the break-down:

I'm a grad student at LSU working with deer....

I caught a bunch of deer and put tracking devices on them. I've followed
them around for 1-2 years depending on the deer.

Thus, I have a data file for each deer that list all the dates in which I
located the animal:

Date1
Date2
Date3
....Date228


In one of my analysis I am estimating the probability of an animal surviving
through the year or season.....
To do this, I am using Program MARK -

Program MARK uses 'encounter histories' to do this...

Thus....my data (from above) must be reformatted into an 'encounter history'
......

with '10' meaning the animal was alive when i located it.

Thus, the above data set should then look like:

101010.......10

So, is there anyway that I can convert a list of dates (in the format
12312009) into one line of an 'encounter history'???
Can excel string together a '10' for every cell that was being used (had a
date in it)............?

Otherwise, I've got 48 deer with 200+ encounters each....... I'm looking at
manually entering ten-thousand '10''s.

Any ideas??

Any help would be much appreciated...

Thanks -

Justin