Today at CSSCR I worked with a client who had to export data from Catalyst (The University of Washington web tools system) to SPSS. She had a lot of data from the surveys and some of the replies were pretty lengthy. When she tried to export her data from Catalyst directly to SPSS (.sav), it came through somewhat corrupted, with the strings split up into several pieces.
After several attempts to merge the variables within SPSS (using merge and aggregate commands), I decided that it would be much easier to work in Excel and import those files into SPSS. Catalyst exports easily enough into Excel, and we were able to get nice, predictable results in those files.
Attempting to import the Excel files into SPSS gave us a nasty shock however, when SPSS continually found those files to be empty!
I had a thought and we moved the dataset into the consultant's systems where we have StatTransfer installed. I loaded the set into the StatTransfer and converted the data directly into an SPSS file.
That .sav file loaded perfectly into SPSS (v.13) and the client was on her way, ready to go.
A convoluted but ultimately sucessful job- I am going to investigate the matter further, and see if Catalyst has had any troubles with SPSS exports before.
-TJ
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