You can enter data directly into SPSS in data view, but many times people will
have data they have already entered in Excel. SPSS gives you options for getting
data from various formats into SPSS. The steps that we're going to learn now will
work to get data into SPSS from Excel, or from any of the other file formats that
SPSS recognizes. In the previous exercise, you created an Excel file that you saved
as quizscores.xlsx. If you do not have this file, you can create it in
about two minutes while watching the Excel formulas, functions, and summation
video, or you can use any other Excel file as long as it is formatted with a
variable name in the first row, and a column of numbers. I am going to open
quizscores.xlsx in Excel so that you can see the numbers. On sheet 1, make
sure that you have the variable named "quiz scores" in cell a1, and "numbers" in
the cells down to a28. You do not need to add anything else to this data. Here
are the numbers in case you still need to create this data set yourself.
Save the file to the desktop, and this is very important, you must close
the workbook in Excel. You cannot open a file in SPSS if it is already open in
another application. So now we are ready to open an excel worksheet in SPSS.
First, open SPSS.
In SPSS, open the quizscores.xlsx dataset by choosing file > open > data.
Direct SPSS to look at the desktop where you saved the quizscores.xlsx
file previously. You don't see it, do you? That is because SPSS is looking for SPSS
data sets. Those are files with a.sav suffix. We want to open an Excel workbook
which is .xlsx. Change files of type to Excel. The quizscores.xlsx file
will now be visible. Now by the way, if you were opening a .csv or some other
format, this is where you would choose that setting. In the next window that
appears, you have some options. We wisely created our variable names in the first
row of Excel, so we want this option - read variable names from first row of data. In
the worksheet window choose sheet1. If our data were on a different worksheet,
we could choose that sheet here. Leave it set to sheet1, and click OK. When the
dataset opens in SPSS, choose variable view. Now set the measure to scale for
this variable. We have now imported data from Excel into SPSS. Save this new data
set to the desktop as quizscores.sav. An SPSS dataset uses the suffix .sav.
Next, we will run a simple analysis in SPSS, and then export the output to
Microsoft Word.