How to transfer Excel data into SPSS

If you have gathered survey data online, chances are your data are in an Excel sheet, rather than SPSS.
Follow the steps below to transfer your data into SPSS.

1. Open SPSS and go to File – Open – Data

2. In the Open Data window, change the ‘Files of Type drop-down’ to All Files(*.*)

3. Locate your Excel data file, click on it and click Open.

4. If the top row in your Excel data sheet contains the variable names, keep the check box ‘Read variable
names from the first row of data’ checked. If the top row of your Excel sheet is raw data, uncheck this
box. Click OK.
5. If you remember how we set up SPSS sheets, categorical variables are entered as numbers, rather than
words (eg. Male = 1, Female = 2). However, if your Excel data sheet contained words, these will have
been copied as words into SPSS (rather than values with labels). Also, in the variable view you’ll see the
‘Type’ column will be set to ‘String’, which is not the format we want. To correct this, do the following:

a. Go to Transform – Recode into same variable

b. Move across the variable that needs changing to the box on the right and click on Old and New
Values.

c. In the ‘Old Value’ box, enter one of the category words, as it currently appears in your data set
(eg. Male) and in the ‘New Value’ box enter a number that will represent this category (eg. 1).
Then click on Add. Repeat this process for all the category names, allocating a new value for
each category. Make sure you make a note of the old and new values. When you’ve finished
click Continue and OK.
 d. The category names will have been replaced by numbers in the data view, however in the
variable view, the data ‘Type’ column will still be set to ‘String’. To change this click on the blue
box within the type cell, select numeric and click OK.

e. Now assign each of the new values we set earlier to a text-label by clicking within the ‘Values’
cell. Enter each value and label in turn and click Add. Then click OK.

f. Repeat step 5 for any other variables containing text-based data rather than numbers.

6. Your Excel data are now ready to work with in SPSS.

Charlotte Elwell | 2012

(SPSS v.18)