Ventana software support forum

Hi Vensim users,

We are noticing that when using the command VDF2TIDY (described here https://www.vensim.com/documentation/vdf2tidy.html) it doesn't want to export data from a Vensim run if a given variable is defined as DATA. So effectively one has to create a passthrough variable of AUXILLIARY type that has the same information as in the DATA variable to export the data to CSV.

Thanks for any advice,

Paweł Olejarnik

I think that may have been a deliberate choice, because data variables can have an arbitrary time axis, not matching the model. That would really increase the size of the tidy matrix.

What's the use case for exporting the data from the simulation, rather than using the input data?

Thanks tomfid.

In regards to "What's the use case for exporting the data from the simulation, rather than using the input data?"

if you have the data in Excel, it goes into your vensim Model for example as a DATA variable. You then want to store it in the DW, so you use the export option of VDF2TIDY. So like that you can store what went into the model as INPUT and eventually do comparison how INPUTS change, etc. type of work once you store data. Effectively there can be cases where an input to a model is already and output of the model as no changes are done to the data in run time.

VDF2TAB might be a better choice for this.