I have encountered a problem while preparing ecological data for an RLQ analysis. The data files are as follows and contain information on river macrophytes in Great Britain. 

Type	File	Rows	Columns	Data type	
L	Sites (r) by species (C)	394	49	Relative abundance 	
R	Sites (r) by Environmental variables (C)	394	3	1 column is 2 decimal place data, the other columns are positive integer	
Q	Species (r) by Species traits (C)	49	47	Positive integer data	

We have tried a number of ways of preparing the file following the procedures in Module Documentation IV. 
•	Correspondence Analysis of the L file works fine. 
•	Weighted MCA of the R and Q files is not an option as the files do not contain categorical data but have quantative data. We did not wish to loss information by converting them to categorical data.
•	Weighted CA was attempted as an alternative. It had worked with similar data previously. 

Weighted COA of Q
The file was weighted using file.fcpc produced by COA of L. This does work. 

Weighted COA of R
The file was weighted using file.fcpl generated during COA of L. This did not work. The error message was ‘ Non convenient file for this option (row margin = 0)’. 
By increasing the column number to 4 in R - by adding a dumby variable with all rows equal to 1 or as a randomly generated column of numbers - the file would be processed. 
Also a non row weighted COA of R works. It seems the row weighting option has problems dealing with data files containing only 3 columns. 

Possible solution
It is possible to weight the R table using the row weights in file.fcpl in excel and then performing a normal COA. Is this valid?