Skip to main content
Jay1-Visitor
1-Visitor
October 7, 2010
Solved

I'm having difficulty in assigning units to col "0" of an external data file

  • October 7, 2010
  • 10 replies
  • 5445 views

I'm not sure why I'm not able to assign units to column "0" of an externally read data file without getting the error that "the value must be scalar or a matrix" ..? The other columns (1 thru 3 in my example) seem to accept the units definitions. Perhaps I just going about this all wrong, what am I missing, please?

Thanks,

Jay

Best answer by RichardJ

Look at row 489.

You have at least two blocks of corrupted data in column 1.

10 replies

IRstuff1-Visitor
1-Visitor
October 7, 2010

It would be much more useful if you post the actual file, rather than a picture of the file.

TTFN

Jay1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
October 7, 2010

Thank-you very much for taking a look at this.

RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
October 7, 2010

We need to see the data file and the worksheet that reads it.

Jay1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
October 7, 2010

Thank you ver much for taking a look at this.

RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
October 7, 2010
So the real question is what is the best way of discovering such mistakes, especially when the error message isn't informative enough?

Always look at the data. Even if you don't have any apparent errors it is a really good idea to look at the data. Scan though the numbers (it's the first thing I did - the only thing I opened was the Excel file). I always graph the data and look at it, although not necessarily in Mathcad (I have other software that allows me to look at a very large number of files very easily). Maybe you see a spike. Or missing values (if you were to graph column 1 that's what you would see in this case). Or some other sort of weird behavior that you know can't be right. Looking at the data may take a little time, but it's likely to be a lot less time than could be wasted chasing red-herring "bugs" in the data analysis!

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement