Can you copy and paste value labels from spss?
January 29, 2025 6:58 AM   Subscribe

I do not currently have an SPSS license, but I need to know this: Is it possible to easily copy and paste a list of value labels from an existing data set? If so, can you memail such a list so I can see the format and tell me how you got it? I need it to paste as plain text. Also can you tell me if you grabbed it and pasted it all at once or needed to copy the value column and label column separately.

I need to treat this list as data, but to do that i need to have an example of the format it would be in. Also acceptable if you can get SPSS to spit this out as part of some syntax (via some paste dialog box) or analysis output in which case I could strip the other parts of the syntax.
posted by If only I had a penguin... to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
I believe there's a library out there for Python, pyreadstat, that allow you to import SPSS data sets into a pandas data frame, which is a very common stats data structure in python. Once imported you could do what you'd like with the data. I'm sorry I don't have specific line-by-line directions.

https://pypi.org/project/pyreadstat/
https://ofajardo.github.io/pyreadstat_documentation/_build/html/index.html
https://github.com/Roche/pyreadstat?tab=readme-ov-file#reading-files

It seems like it would do what you need...if you know how to use python a little. Since I have an IDE installed, know how to install libraries, and can understand the documentation, for me this answer qualifies as a way to "easily copy and paste a list of value labels from an existing [SPSS] data set." YMMV
posted by AbelMelveny at 7:19 AM on January 29


Response by poster: Thanks...just to clarify, the people doing the copying and pasting will definitely not have python knowledge, ability to add plug-ins or anything else and I will not have access to the data. Basically I need to know if a casual SPSS user can copy out the value labels and if so, how and what it would like if they did.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:44 AM on January 29


If I highlight a couple columns in data view, right click and choose "Copy with Variable Labels", and paste into a text document, I get a tab separated row of labels followed by several tab separated rows of data. I tested this in SPSS 28 on Windows, which I have access to, but barely ever use.
posted by advicepig at 8:06 AM on January 29


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