All values turned blank when in ‘data browse’ or ‘data edit’

[Holly niraghallaigh]

Dear users,
I would be so grateful if anyone could help. I have tried the help function and manual and google.

I have a two clinical data sets each with 95 variables (combination of string and numerical) and approx 2,500 obs per dataset. I am a new user but have had no issues until yesterday - I wanted to browse my data to check something and when I clicked data browse and the data window appears all the cells are empty. The same thing has happened to my second dataset. Has anyone ever experienced this issue before? There are small dots visible in some cells, but other entire variables have nothing in the cells. From memory the commands I had been using prior to noticing this were table, tab, logistic and summarize. Many thanks for any advice

[Clyde Schechter]

The cells with small dots would represent numeric variables with a missing value for that observation. Completely blank cells would be string variables with a missing value for that observation.

It may be that you unwittingly sorted your data in such a way that missing values have come to the top of the data set. It is also possible, if these data were imported from a spreadsheet, that you have far more than 2,500 observations in them: sometimes importing from Excel brings in many additional "rows" that have nothing but missing values in them and are not really part of the data set.

One way to be sure would be to -summarize- the data set. The string variables will be listed as having 0 observations, but the numeric variables will show you how many non-missing observations are present. Assuming that looks normal, the data are there and you are probably just looking at an inconveniently sorted data set. You could -sort- on one of the numeric variables: for numerics, non-missing observations sort to the top, so then if you browse the data set at the top you should see values, at least for that variable.

If -summarize- shows that you have no observations for your numeric variables, then somehow your data set has been wiped out, and you will need to re-create it.

[Holly niraghallaigh]

Ohmygosh you’re right! I scrolled right down to about 3,000 observations down and my whole dataset is there it’s just upside down! Thank you so much. This is the data for my thesis and I have been quietly freaking out for about two hours now trying to work out what happened!! So clearly I guess it’s sorted all the missing values first. Or I somehow did that but I cannot work out how! I have now chosen one of my cat variables to sort and they’re all back up at the top! Although each patient is now not in sequential order going from the earliest study ID to the latest but I will figure that our. I am enormously grateful for your help.