Working with ASCII Data in SPSS

SPSS on Unix, Windows or the Mac all allow you to import ASCII data files.  An ASCII data file is text and numbers only.  Word processing packages like Word or Wordperfect insert text formatting commands into the file that will not be useable by the statistical packages.

If you are working with scanned data and want to clean up the file before importing it into SPSS (or any other Stats package), you should use an ascii editor.  If you are using a Macintosh, we would suggest BBEDIT.  If you are using Windows, the PFE Editor.  On Unix you may use pico or vi. The two programs listed for Windows and the Mac will work with large files and are full featured ASCII editors. These editors may be downloaded from http://www.shareware.com.

The following is an example of ASCII data.  The file consists of six records from a survey on pay equity. 

     1 25 3
     5 32 2
     1 39 5
     5 41 4
     1 24 2
     5 24 1
In this example the first column is gender (1=male, 5=female), the second column of numbers is age and the third is payscale where 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest.  You will also notice that the first column is not all the way to the left of the screen.  You may purchase forms from the Computer Center that will allow your subjects to bubble responses that then can be scanned into an ascii files. Contact Academic Computing for information on scanning survey results.

Each statistical package will have a different method for importing ASCII (raw) data.  Please refer to the individual documents for this information.