I'd love to believe that our loyal SAS customers never have to touch a statistical package from another company. Even as I work away in my comfy SAS bubble here in Cary, NC, I occasionally catch wind of stories about SAS customers who need to use data that comes from other products, such as SPSS, Stata, and even our own JMP.
Since version 9.1.3, SAS has supported an easy method to import these data files using the IMPORT procedure. With just a few lines of code and the help of our SAS/ACCESS to PC Files product, you can write a SAS program that slurps that data into a SAS data set. (You can use the EXPORT procedure to convert SAS data sets to these third-party formats too -- just in case you ever need that.)
To make it even easier for our SAS Enterprise Guide users, I built a set of simple tasks that you can use with SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 -- no programming necessary. You can download the task here. (It's a ZIP file; use the README.txt instructions for simple installation.) When you install it and restart SAS Enterprise Guide, you'll see an additional three items in the Add-Ins menu: one for each of the supported file types: SPSS (.sav), JMP, and Stata (.dta) files.
The tasks are simple to use: you pick the file to import, and the task copies the file to your SAS server (if your SAS session is on a remote host) and then runs the IMPORT procedure. The resulting SAS data is stored in your WORK library, and the data and SAS log are both added to your project. (Note these requirements: you need at least SAS 9.1.3 with SAS/ACCESS to PC Files installed on your SAS machine.)
Try it out! And then please tell me how it goes by adding your comments back here on the blog.
By the way, these tasks are "baked in" for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, our forthcoming release, along with many other new tasks and features that I'll blog about soon.
9 Comments
Any chance we can get this functionality w/o needing SAS/ACCESS? I work in marketing research and 100% of our data comes in SPSS even though I work exclusively in SAS (and primarily in EG). I would use the import from SPSS every day, but wouldn't need all of the other stuff that comes with SAS/ACCESS, which is why my (small) business won't purchase it. (Note : there is no additional plug-in needed in SPSS to import or export SAS data.)
Jeremy,
Alas, no. The ability to read and write SPSS files is currently bundled with the SAS/ACCESS to PC Files product, which also supports many other formats including Excel, MS Access, JMP, Stata and others listed here:
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/acpcref/59619/HTML/default/a003103610.htm
Chris
Hi,
I came across this page looking for information on converting sav and sps files to some usable form for JMP, since JMP doesn't recognize them in their original form. Can this be done? My PC does not have SPSS (hence my problem) or anything other stats software, only JMP.
Thanks for your help.
Jamie,
I don't know the answer, but this is a perfect question to post to the new JMP discussion forum on the SAS support site:
http://support.sas.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=43
Chris
The SPSS conversion addin seems good, but still limited in ability. For instance how will I get the formats loaded? (The value labels that are available in SPSS). There is no point in just loading the data and having to spend a lot of time formatting the value labels.
Thanks
Vignesh
use the following code to get the formats loaded (data value labels that are available in spss)
proc format lib=libraryname cntlout=newsasdatasetname ;
run;
the data value labels that are available in spss are stored in the cntlout=new sas data set name
There is no point in just loading the data and having to spend a lot of time formatting the value labels.
We tried to install this but recived an error "invalid object DNA". Refering to e support.sas.com/kb/41/583.html, we notice that the error was because we were running EG 4.2? Who should we approach to have this fixed?
Ian, EG 4.2 and 4.3 have this feature built-in (Tasks->Data->Import SPSS Data). You don't need the custom task to make it work.
2 Trackbacks
[...] can already open JMP data files (and SPSS and Stata) into SAS Enterprise Guide with yet another [...]
[...] exchanges between SAS and other PC-based applications, including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, SPSS, and [...]