Epi Info™ User Guide

Command Reference

Introduction

Epi Info 7 is easy to operate in interactive mode, but complex or repeated operations require saving the steps as programs. Programs (similar to “scripts” in other software) can be used to set up menus, guide and limit the data entry process, restructure data, and do analyses.

In Form Designer and Classic Analysis, programming consists of interacting with a series of dialogs that produce the actual program statements. Experienced users may want to edit the statements or type them directly in the Program Editor. For this reason, the details of command syntax are provided and include a definition of each command and its operation because a single command (e.g., EXECUTE) may be found in Form Designer, Classic Analysis, and Visual Dashboard. Commands are in module-based chapters with notation of differences that may exist between program implementation.

You may find some of the commands are only available in one or two of the programs. The data entry commands are called Check Commands. These are saved in the Form Designer and executed in the Enter module. The commands used in Classic Analysis are saved and executed in the Program Editor window within Classic Analysis.

Functions and operators are used within commands to do common tasks. For example, you can use functions and operators to do the following:

• extract a year from a date;
• combine two numeric values;
• calculate the duration between dates;
• convert numbers to text; or
• convert text to numbers.