title: How to change variables into quantitative?
body: <p>I have a data matrix (900 columns and 5000 rows), which I would like to do a pca on..</p>
  
  <p>The matrix looks very well in excel (meaning all the values are quantitative), but after I read my file in R and try to run the pca code , i get an error saying that "The following variables are not quantitative" and I get a list of non-quantitative variables. </p>
  
  <p>So in general, some variables are quantitative and some are not.
  See the example as follows. 
  When I check for variable 1, it is correct and quantitative.. (randomly some variables are quantitative in the file)
  When I check for variable 2, it is incorrect and non-quantitative.. (randomly some variables like this are non-quantitative in the file) </p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; data$variable1[1:5]
  [1] -0.7617504 -0.9740939 -0.5089303 -0.1032487 -0.1245882
  
  &gt; data$variable2[1:5]
  [1] -0.183546332959017 -0.179283451229594 -0.191165669598284 -0.187060515423038
  [5] -0.184409474669824
  731 Levels: -0.001841783473108 -0.001855956210119 ... -1,97E+05
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So my question is, how can I change all the non-quantitative variables into quantitative ??</p>
  
  <p>Making the file short does not help , as the values get quantitative on its own. I do not know whats happening. 
  So here is the link for my original file &lt;- <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzP-YLnUNCdwakc4dnhYdEpudjQ/edit" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzP-YLnUNCdwakc4dnhYdEpudjQ/edit</a></p>
  
  <p>I also tried the answers given below, but it still doesnt help. </p>
  
  <p>So let me show what exactly I had done, </p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; data &lt;- read.delim("file.txt", header=T)
  &gt; res.pca = PCA(data, quali.sup=1, graph=T)
  Error in PCA(data, quali.sup = 1, graph = T) :
  The following variables are not quantitative:  batch
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target79
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target148
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target151
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target217
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target266
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target515
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target530
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target587
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target620
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target730
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target739
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target801
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target803
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target809
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target819
  The following variables are not quantitative:  target868
  The following variables a
  In addition: There were 50 or more warnings (use warnings() to see the first 50)
  </code></pre>