[shriphani]

The bigger issue here seems to be the use of ordinals in the data collection process. For instance, a lot of my CSVs don't have them and R and pandas are perfectly capable of enumerating. Why do you even need to put ordinals in the dataset? Does excel want this sort of thing or something?

[avs733]

Your don't need to people just do... I've kinda always assumed or connects to olden days and efficient storage and memory use. Male is a four character string, 1 is an integer.