Am I being paranoid in thinking it's sensible to convert anonymized xslx spreadsheets of OA stuff to .csv (comma-separated-values) to assure that erased/personal info is *really* not there? (No formulas, and .csv is more compact, so doing it anyway, but...)
Ell Bee, See?
and
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it's also good practice re: long term data storage, sharing in non-proprietary formats too :)
- Hedgehog
I don't think you're being paranoid. Metadata has a way to sticking to places you don't expect.
- bentley
Sounds like a good idea to me
- Christina Pikas
Thanks. In this case, not just metadata: The wrong Undo could undo a whole lot of anonymizing... The 30%-40% savings in space is a nice extra. (And, of course, I could open the files in Word to verify that there's NOTHING in them except the data.)
- walt crawford
Followup: Looks like I'll wind up uploading in .xslx form so that I can include a data_key sheet for coded values--but the data's already made a roundtrip to .csv, and Excel actually has a set of inspection features that allow you to delete all metadata. I anticipate uploading these to figshare tomorrow.
- walt crawford