Hello, I am hoping to get an opinion from the user community about how Phoenix treats certain type of data. Please respond letting me know your preference. Currently if you type (in a numeric column) a number in parenthesis (50.2) it gets converted to a negative number (e.g., -50.2). This functionality is similar to Excel but it is unlike how R treats these type of data. R treats the data as text and therefore it does not allow operations with it. We are thinking about changing this functionality in Phoenix to resemble R and thus values in parenthesis are treated as text In other words, if you want a negative value you type -50.2, if you type (50.2) this is just considered a text value. Please let me know how you would expect this to work. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, Ana Phoenix Product Manager
I think I should clarify that if you had a text defined column that had a mixture of true numbers and other values e.g. (50.2), and then performed some numerical operation on them, or plotted them. The results would only use the true numbers (50.2) would be treated as text, i.e. not plotted, excluded from the calculation etc. So one part of the proposed change is to make sure that bracketed values are treated consistently, regardless of whether the column is defined as text or numeric. Simon.
Hi Simon & Ana, Excel never fails surprising me. Just tested (50.2) ⎠gives -50.2. That’s bizarre. (50.2) is a character string, whereas -50.2 and 50.2 are not. I think Phoenix should not treat it as a number – even if the column is formated as text.
Hi Ana , Indeed it is a very strange behavior in Excel and I don’t think we should replicate it. I expect that when I type anything that had a non numeric character to be converted to text and treated as such: number : 50.3 text : “50.3” text:(50.3) number: -50.3 null empty cell: NA ? is there a separate missing / empty value code for numeric versus text ? it will also be helpful to understand how phoenix deal with converting text to numeric or numeric to text. R has special rules for these. Samer
I vote for (50.2) to be recognized as text. I believe Excel converts this to a negative number because that is how accounting software treats numbers. Before red and black ink was available in printers, negative numbers were identified by placing them inside of parentheses. So there is a bit of logic to Excel … it just doesn’t apply to most pharmaceutical applications. Nathan