Findings, implications and lessons learned

• Genstat (and other statistical packages) have useful data manipulation facilities. Here, we have shown how a program can be written and executed in GenStat. Knowledge of how GenStat translates information contained in a dialog box into its own language stored in the Input file can be useful in other instances and perhaps save time. For example, six columns in CS2Data2 were rounded to the nearest integer by successively modifying the dialog box produced by Data → Calculations…. Rather than complete the dialog box six times the user could instead fill the dialog box once, see how the instruction has been translated in Input file , edit the statement five times and run the section of statements. Thus, the Input file that is submitted would look like:

"Statements produced when filling in dialog box" CALCULATE TOTYLD=ROUND(TOTYLD) FSPREADSHEET [SHEET=3843712; METHOD=replace] TOTYLD "Statements appended after editing first statement for TOTYLD" CALCULATE YLD210=ROUND(YLD210) CALCULATE EXPTOT=ROUND(EXPTOT) CALCULATE EXP210=ROUND(EXP210) CALCULATE RESTOT=ROUND(RESTOT) CALCULATE RES210=ROUND(RES210) FSPREADSHEET [SHEET=3843712; METHOD=replace] YLD210,EXPTOT, EXP210,\ RESTOT,RES210

It is often useful to store and save some of the statements contained within an Input file for this is a much quicker way for rerunning the same analysis on another occasion rather than completing and executing each dialog box again.