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Browse All TopicsHow do I save an Excel file or any data file in SPSS format withouth having to go through SPSS.
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by: richdiesalPosted on 2009-02-17 at 11:24:51ID: 23663148
Short answer: You can't. Best option is to save as an Excel 2003 XLS and open that directly within SPSS.
Long answer: SPSS saves in a binary proprietary format (opposed to plain text). If the SAV files were in plain text, you could reconstruct them line by line with an Excel macro. Unfortunately, they're not. So unless you personally can reverse engineer the code contained in an SPSS SAV file in order to figure out what all of their binary codes mean (and no one seems to have done so yet), you would never be able to create a properly constructed (i.e. non-corrupt) SAV file.
SPSS does have a fairly robust import engine, however, so there are many formats you can simply open within SPSS (including XLS and even XLSX as of SPSS 13, I believe).