Obviously, the first thing to do here is to check that the data has come across successfully. SPSS will import your data into a new Data View with variable names at the top. Once you’ve selected the options you require, and checked your data looks okay in the preview window, press OK to begin the import. If SPSS is unable to determine a data type on this basis it will assign the variable to a string type. In our example, a variable will be assigned to a particular data type if 95% of values match that type (for example, if 95% of values are numeric in form). The percentage is the proportion of values in a particular column that must match a specific data type for SPSS to assign that data type to a variable. This is how the latest version of SPSS assigns a data type to your variables. Mainly these are self-explanatory, but it is probably worth explaining the “Percentage of values that determine data type” option. This dialog box offers a number of options. Open the file, and you’ll get the Read Excel File dialog box. Then navigate to the folder that contains your Excel file, and you’ll see your Excel file pop up (see 2 above). In the Files of type box, you need to select Excel (see 1 above, though obviously things will look slightly different if you’re using a Mac). Once you click Data, the Open Data box will appear. To start, click File -> Open -> Data (as below). We’re going to use a method that allows backward compatibility with older versions of SPSS. There are a number of different ways to import data into SPSS. Once you have got your worksheet straight, you can open up SPSS. For example, if you had coded one of the Frisbee Throwing Distance items as “50m” rather than just “50”, this would be a good time to make a correction. Our worksheet satisfies both these requirements.

You can see in our example that we have 5 columns of data.īefore you begin the process of importing your data into SPSS, you need to ensure that your variable names are in the first row of the worksheet, and that there is no gap between the first and second rows. Open the Excel spreadsheet from which you wish to import data.

This tutorial explains how to import data from Excel into the SPSS statistics package.

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