Lots of unecessary columns in Excel data file

Builder
1

OS: Win10
PsychoPy version: 2020.2.4
Standard Standalone?: yes

I have managed to set up my build so that the data saves as a .csv file (opened with Excel), but there is so much data in the file that I don’t understand and can’t use. Random numbers with no labels, multiple columns for routines that are just instruction screens- there aren’t any relevant data until column BD! This is only the demo, which includes 10 trials, but my final experiment will include around 80 trials, so I’m concerned that it will take up too many columns on the spreadsheet and it will crash or I will miss data from the later trials entirely. Does anyone know a way of making the experiment record the data in a more efficient way?

I’ve been trawling though the user guides on here and through the message boards, but I don’t know how to code so I don’t understand any of it. I don’t have time to learn Python (that’s why I thought Psychopy would be easier!), is there any faster alternative?

2

If you want to limit what is saved in your output you can set it so that the onset/offset of stimuli are not saved and that should free up some columns. Open up each component, open the ‘data’ tab and untick the save onset/offset.

I wouldn’t worry too much about the number of columns crashing your experiment. My default mode is to save everything because it is easier to remove columns in analysis, than later wish something was saved, but it is personal preference! :slight_smile:

Becca

3

Thanks very much, that worked like a charm! I also realised that it was recording key responses for every key I’d made- even the keys that simply took the participants to the next page of instructions. So a lot of columns contained info on that, which I removed.
Thanks again,

Toby :slight_smile: