Numeric variable being saved as text

[jarvis24]

[edited from support email]
My lab has been using MediaLab for a year and it's been great. However, we are getting a new experiment ready and, after doing a few practice runs, I noticed that the data for one (and only one) of my questionnaires is being written to SPSS as a "String" variable. The width of the column is 50 characters, and under the "Measure" tab in SPSS, it says "Nominal" instead of "Scale" (the rest of my variables say scale). I would like for this questionnaire to be written to SPSS like the rest of them (i.e., as a Numeric variable, 8 character width, and "Scale" (rather than Nominal).

[jarvis24]

I assume you have "write as text" unchecked for that item? If so, then try clearing your data folder and do a test run to generate new data file headers (be sure to back up any old data first!). This can help if the variable was text the first time that a session was ever run. Let me know if that doesn't help.
-Blair

[NancyBrodsky]

Is that choice available in v. 2004? I only see a column labeled "WriteText" with either 1 or 2 as values.

Thanks

[jarvis24]

Yes, the option is available in all versions--you should see a check mark style option for it if you click on "Details" for any given item in the questionnaire.

[rmagee]

I've cleared the data files, made sure the Write Data as Text box was unchecked, and I've had the same problem. The numeric data are written in the Excel file, but I get a series of error messages (about 40 or so) at the end of running the experiment. I get these on four (out of 8) questionnaire files, one for each variable in the file.

I'm running ML 2008.1.33 on a Dell machine (3GB Ram, 2.13 Ghz Intel chip) with Windows 7 Home.