To understand what it does, and why it is used, consider a standard Lertap 5 job: a user puts his/her item responses, and perhaps other data, into a workbook's Data worksheet.  S/he puts control statements, or control "cards", into the CCs worksheet.

 

Users then click on the Run drop-down menu, and selects the "Interpret CCs lines" option.  What happens?  Lertap looks at the rows in the CCs worksheet to find out which columns in the Data worksheet the user wants to analyse, and then it goes on to read data, and add new worksheets to the workbook.

 

The most obvious worksheet added by this step is the one called "Freqs".

 

Users pause to scan the information found in the Freqs worksheet.  If all is in order, the user usually returns to the Run menu, and clicks on "Elmillon item analysis".

 

What happens?  Lertap adds more new worksheets to the workbook, such as "Scores", "Stats1f", "Stats1b", and so on.

 

These worksheets which Lertap adds are called secondary worksheets.  The original Data and CCs worksheets are referred to as primary worksheets.  At any time, the secondary worksheets may be regenerated if the primary worksheets are still on hand.

 

What the little does is allow the user to quickly delete the secondary worksheets.  When this icon is clicked on, a dialog box appears which informs users that "all worksheets whose names begin with freqs, scores, sub, stats, and histo will be deleted" if the user clicks on the OK button.

 

Why would a user want to delete the secondary worksheets?  Probably to save disk space.  The secondary worksheets can be quite large if there are many items in the data set, and/or if there are many records in the data set.  Users may also want to delete the secondary worksheets if they want to send a copy of their workbook to someone else.

 

Ordinarily, no harm is done by using .  Going through the process of "Interpret CCs lines" and "Elmillon item analysis" will restore the secondary worksheets at any time.  Users who wish to make sure their secondary worksheets will not be deleted by this icon should rename the worksheets, perhaps by putting a prefix before their names.  For example, Freqs might be renamed as OrigFreqs.  Note that renaming Freqs as FreqsOrig would do no good as the worksheet's name still begins with Freqs -- a prefix is suggested, not a suffix.

 

How to rename a worksheet?  The fastest way is to right-click on the worksheet's tab at the bottom of the screen.  To read about the various ways which may be used to rename worksheets, please refer to Excel Help.