Can I import multiple Excel ranges into SPSS?

Question

I've got an absolutely horrible dataset in Excel (13,500 variables, a lot of them irrelevant to my purposes). I need to analyse in SPSS as I have a lot of data transformations to do... but SPSS 24 struggles with a dataset that size. Well... either SPSS struggles, or my work PC does.

Is there a way, when importing data from Excel, to import multiple ranges? Specifically, I want Column A (my unique identifier), then several other ranges (e.g. G:AC, DD:JJ, etc.).

/CELLRANGE=RANGE only seems to allow a single range.

Answer 1

If you have the appropriate ODBC driver for Excel, you can use the database reading facility in Statistics to select the fields. However, the catch with ODBC and Office is that the bigness has to match. If both are 32-bit, that's easy, but 64-bit Statistics would need 64-bit Office, and that's a world of hurt.

Answer 2

No (you can't specify multiple ranges), is the short answer. What you ought to be doing is importing the entire relevant range and then using SPSS commands to manipulate as you desire. For example using ADD FILES FILE with DROP sub command to delete irrelevant columns/variables.

Answer 3

I don't know of a way to directly import multiple ranges from Excel. You might try importing the file to an MS Access database first, then read the table from the database to SPSS using (in SPSS) "open database" --> "new query". The query editor will let you specify the fields you want to import.