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Interfacing with Excel

SPSS® Reference Manual: A guide for market researchers

Prepared by Paul Hartzer

Contents

Transferring SPSS Output to Excel

Once you've generated some SPSS output, there are two primary ways to move this into Excel for formatting and distribution. In addition, SPSS output files themselves can be saved and shared (readable within SPSS). You can use tradition copy-paste techniques to move tables one at a time from the SPSS output window to Excel. Simply click on the table you want, press Ctrl-C, flip to Excel, and press Ctrl-V. The drawback to this method is that it only allows one table at a time, so if you want to copy more than half a dozen files, using the Export-Open method is probably faster.

Export-Open method

  1. On the menu, select File.
  2. Click Export...
  3. On the Export Output dialog box, select Excel file as your file type.
  4. Enter the desired file name.
  5. Generally, you'll want to export all visible objects. However, in some cases, you may wish to select specific objects for export, or all objects (that is, including hidden ones).
  6. Once this is done saving, you will be able to open this file in Excel.

Other Excel topics

Copying data values

In the SPSS data window itself, you can copy blocks of cells to the clipboard, as well as pasting the current contents. This allows you to copy data cells to and from Excel, the same way that you would copy a block of cells from one section of Excel to another: Simply highlight the cells you want to copy, press Ctrl-C, move your cursor to where you want to copy the cells, and press Ctrl-V.

Copying lists of variable names

Copying lists of variable names to and from Excel is similar. However, SPSS does not let you use Ctrl-Click to select a range of variable names. Instead, you have to drag over the range you want within the variable view. This can also be done for variable labels.

There are some tasks that are easier to do in Excel. For instance, let's say you had 15 variables, currently named Feat01 to Feat15. You want to change these names to Feature01 to Feature15. SPSS would require that you type this 15 times. Alternately, you could build the new names in Excel using the cell formula ='Feature' & ROW(), then copy these over the existing names.

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All content copyright Paul and/or Valerie Hartzer, all rights reserved, except where indicated. Contact Paul Hartzer with comments. This file was last modified on Monday, February 15, 2010.