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Results

The guidelines for your Analysis Scripts indicated that every time a command generates a figure, table, or some other result that you will present in your report, a new file that preserves the output should be created. These files are referred to as Results Files.

When you adopt a copy-and-paste workflow, you will copy Results from these files and paste them into the appropriate places in your Report.

Contents of the Results/ Folder

Documents

All your results files should be stored in the Results/ folder.

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    There should be a one-to-one correspondence between the Results you present in your Report and your Results Files:

    • Every Result presented in your Report should be preserved in one of the Results Files stored in the Results/ folder.
    • Every Result File stored in the Results/ folder should contain a Result that appears in your Report.

Subfolders of the Results/ folder (optional)

If your Results Files can be organized into distinct categories, it might be useful to create subfolders of the Results/ folder for the different categories.

  • For example...
    • If you have results pertaining to different geographical regions, you could have subfolders called Africa/, Asia/, and LatinAmerica/.
    • If you have results generated by different methods, you could have subfolders called DescriptiveStats/, Simulations/, Regressions/.

    NOTE: Remember to take account of these subfolders when you write relative directory paths in your scripts.

    For example, assuming that you are following the convention of designating the Project/ folder as the working directory, the relative directory path to a subfolder of Results/ called Africa/ would be:

    >Output/Results/Africa

Formats of Results Files

Results Files can be stored in a wide variety of formats. For example:

  • If the Result is a table, it could be exported to a file saved as plain text (.txt), comma separated values (.csv) , or an Excel workbook (.xlsx).
  • If the Result is a figure, it could be saved as .png, .jpg, or any of a large number of alternative formats for graphics files.
  • Many types of output can also be saved as .pdf, .html, and .docx.
  • In some cases, it may be convenient to preserve Results in log files.

Naming the Results Files

Choose informative names for your Results Files. One good strategy is to give them names that correspond to the way the Results are labeled in the Report, such as

  • Figure_1.jpg, Figure_2.jpg, Figure_3.jpg (assuming the figures are saved in .jpg files)
  • Table_1.csv, Table_2.csv, Table_3.csv (assuming the tables are save in .csv files)
  • PointEstimateAndSE_page16.txt (assuming the results are saved in a .txt file)

Remember: the filename extensions of your Results Files will be determined by the formats in which the files were saved.

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