A Appendix A – GeoDa Preference Settings

The Preferences item on the main GeoDa menu includes several options that can be set to fine tune the appearance and performance of the software. They appear under two different tabs, one for System and one for Data. The contents are shown in Figures A.1 and A.2. In a MAC OSX operating system, the preferences are accessed under the GeoDa item on the menu bar. In Windows and Linux, the item is under File.

The System preferences pertain to detailed settings for the map and plot properties, support for multiple languages, general appearance and computational customization.

The map and plot appearance settings control the transparency of selected items, font size, and an option to revert to the legacy method of highlighting selected observations using cross-hatching (this was the method used in legacy GeoDa version 0.9.5-i).

In addition to the default English, GeoDa currently has language customization in all menus and dialogs for Simplified Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and French, with more languages slated to be added in the future.

Several minor options determine the appearance of a few dialogs dealing with data entry, and other options such as automatic crash detection and software updates, as well as Retina display support (on Mac only). Finally, some features are the default settings for the random number seed, and the number of cores and/or GPU used in computation. Most of these are best left to their default specification.

Figure A.1: Preferences Settings - System

Under the Data tab, the most useful setting is the supported formats for dates and time (see also Section 2.4.1.2 in Chapter 2). The other items pertain to the interaction with remote data base servers, as well as the numerical stopping criterion used in the auto-weighting method for spatially constrained clustering (covered in Volume 2). Here as well, the default should be fine for most situations in practice.

Figure A.2: Preferences Settings - Data