Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The handy thing here is that C:6 contains a formula, not just a number,
so if the contents of C:3 are changed, then the formula will update the
result in C:6 automatically. This is why business users find spreadsheets
so useful for exploratory data analysis.
Excel and Calc have fairly good selection of tools and formulas, but for more
sophisticatedanalysismanyresearcherswillwanttoimporttheirdataintopro-
grams such as SPSS, SAS, Stata or perhaps Matlab or IDL. Here we show how
to import an Excel (xls) spreadsheet into SPSS and then SAS.
Example
Importing an Excel spreadsheet into SPSS
The SPSS application imports spreadsheets in a straightforward way. Start
up SPSS, with a new empty dataset. Then choose from the
File
menu,
Open->Data….
In the file browser dialog navigate to the right folder, and
set the
Files of Type
to “Excel (
*
.xls)” or “All Files (
*
.
*
)”. Double-click on
your spreadsheet file, or select it and click the
Open
button.
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