Survex Help

[Andy Waddington on Survey stuff]

Paul> could not open any of the files with extension *.svx

Olly> right-click and choose "Process"

I suspect that when Paul says "open" he wants to look at a .svx file, rather
than process it through Survex. Right-click and choose "Open with..." which
should pop up a list of possible programs. Choose your favourite plain
vanilla text editor (preferably one which copes with Unix-style newlines,
ie. not Notepad, although I bet the example dataset is built with <cr-lf> to
avoid the problem. Be warned - not every dataset you come across will be
made needlessly bigger to help people with crippleware from MS:). You may
want to do the various things needed to associate the .svx extension with
that editor at this stage so that a double-click on a .svx file will
*always* open it in that editor, but be aware that you now won't be able to
double-click on it to run Survex on it.

> How do I start a survey of my own?

You will be able to see how Survex files work once you can open them in
an editor as above.

> Some people create a "template" .svx file

There used to be some examples of such template files in the Austria dataset
(which is what I assume you are still using as the example dataset ?). I
think they will be in a directory with a name like "Templates" or similar.

Andy