ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Data page > Transferring data to specific programs > Transferring data to SPSS

Transferring data to SPSS

Introduction

SPSS is a popular statistical analysis program. Transferring data from ANY-maze to SPSS is relatively simple - the best method being to save data to a SYLK file.

If your data includes repeated measures, you should use the options to Show repeated measures in columns, as this is the format that SPSS expects.

Copy and paste

Copying data and pasting into SPSS does work, but textual data will be lost unless you've already set up the SPSS variables correctly to specify which columns contain text and which contain numbers.

Saving data to a file

SPSS supports all the file formats provided by ANY-maze (SYLK, dBase, CSV and text) but the best ones to use are SYLK and dBase.

The main issue when transferring data to SPSS is variable naming. SPSS will take the column titles from the ANY-maze spreadsheet and use them to create variable names - the problem is that SPSS variable names are limited to 8 characters (in versions prior to V12) and cannot contain spaces and certain other characters. ANY-maze's column titles generally break these variable naming rules.

You can overcome this when you save a file in SYLK format, because ANY-maze will ask you how you want to save the column titles. For older versions of SPSS (before version 12) you can select Use short variable names; for later versions, you can select Use long variable names. This will ensure that the column titles are saved as SPSS-compatible variable names.

In fact, saving data as a dBase file is even easier. In this case ANY-maze always uses short variable names, because dBase field titles (which are like column titles) are limited to 10 characters.

How to open a SYLK or dBase file in SPSS

These instructions are for SPSS version 10.0.7.

 1.Click the File menu. 
 2.Select Open | Data...; the Open file window will appear.  
 3.At the bottom of the window is a list titled Files of Type. Select either 'SYLK' or 'dBase', depending on the type of file you wish to open. 
 4.In the main part of the window, navigate to the file you saved from within ANY-maze and select it. 
 5.Click the Open button. 
 6.When you open a SYLK file, the Open file options window will appear. Click the box labelled Read variable names and then click OK.  

See also:

 •Selecting cells, columns or rows 
 •Copying and saving data 
 •The save data window 

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ANY-maze help topic T0890