Although you can type data directly into SPSS’s data window, many people prefer to enter data in Excel or Google Spreadsheets. The main reasons are that those programs are a bit more user-friendly with entering data and that they are more easily available than SPSS. How would you get Excel or Google Spreadsheet data into SPSS?

Excel

Clicking the blue button below will download a data file in Excel’s .xlsx format, which is the latest format. Older versions of Excel save their files with the .xls extension. Download the file to a directory that is easy to remember (Desktop?) and then open it in Excel.

ATW Excel File

You should see something like this:

The first row is typically used to record the variable names, and data is recorded underneath that row, one row per subject. Scroll down to row 43 in the Excel spreadsheet and you should see this:

See that empty cell in column C, row 43? That is there because a participant in the study did not answer that question. This is "Missing Data". We will see later that it causes some trouble with importing the data into SPSS.

Opening Excel files in SPSS

1. First, close the file in Excel. If you open a file in both Excel and SPSS at the same time, there can be sharing conflicts.
2. In SPSS, using either the Data or Output window, go to the menu bar and select File -> Open -> Data:
   
3. By default, SPSS searches for SPSS data files, which end in .sav. To get it to see Excel files, change the file type to Excel by clicking the "Files of Type" field to Excel.
   
4. Navigate to the folder where you downloaded the atw.xlsx file, select it, and click "Open"
5. A dialog will open, asking how the Excel file should be handled by SPSS. Be sure the "Read variable names from the first row of data" box is checked, then click OK:
   
6. If you look at the Data window, you will see that the formatting of the SPSS data file is a bit odd:
   
7. The reason for that odd formatting is that SPSS was confused about the missing data in the file. Click on the "Variable View" tab at the bottom of the screen, which should give you this:
   
8. As you can see, variable atw02 is listed as a "String" variable, which is computer-speak for letters as opposed to numbers. This is a problem, because SPSS will not perform many analyses (such as computing the mean) on string variables. To solve that problem, simply change the type of the variables so they are all "Numeric." If it bothers you that some of the variables look all scrunched up in the Data Window, you can change their "Columns" to match those of the other variables.

Stats 1 Questions 2-4

Log into Moodle for your course and go to the Stats 1 assignment. Using the new data imported from the atw.xlsx file, answer questions 2 through 4, which involve calculating Descriptive Statistics on three variables. To make sure you are using the new data, and not the data from the two participants that you entered, check the N column and make sure it is greater than 2. When you are done, click the Next button below