Open an SPSS .sav File (No SPSS Licence)

The dictionary that makes an .sav worth having — labels, codes, missing values — can survive the trip into another app. It usually doesn't.

A colleague emails you a .sav file from SPSS. Without an SPSS licence, that has long meant one of two unhappy choices: buy one, or find someone who can export the data to CSV. Stratum 1.4 adds a third option — open the .sav directly, read its whole dictionary, and get to work. No licence, and no CSV round-trip.

To be straight with you: reading .sav isn't unique to Stratum. Free tools like Jamovi and JASP open these files too. What this guide is really about is doing it without losing anything on the way in, and then landing in an app built to take that data somewhere — up to 5 million rows, 30-plus modern charts, ANOVA and regression, control charts, and a clean export.

What a CSV round-trip throws away

An .sav file is more than a grid of numbers. It carries a dictionary: the metadata that tells you what those numbers mean. Three parts matter most.

Variable labels — a human-readable description for each column, so sat_supp can present itself as "How satisfied are you with support?"
Value labels — a map from stored codes to words, so a cell holding 1 reads as "Strongly agree" rather than a bare integer.
User-missing codes — values a variable declares as "not a real answer" (a survey's "No answer" coded as 99, say), so they can be excluded instead of averaged in.

Export that file to CSV and all three vanish. You're left with short cryptic column names, columns full of integer codes whose meanings live in a separate codebook, and missing-value sentinels that now look like ordinary numbers quietly poisoning your averages. The data survives; the meaning doesn't.

Open the file: drag, or File ▸ Import

In Stratum, opening a .sav is the same as opening anything else. Drag the file straight onto the Stratum window or its Dock icon and the grid fills. Prefer menus? File ▸ Import does exactly the same thing. There's no wizard to wrangle and no export step on the SPSS side — the reader parses the dictionary as it loads.

An SPSS .sav file being dragged onto Stratum, with File then Import shown as the menu alternative — Drag the `.sav` onto Stratum, or use File ▸ Import — no CSV export from SPSS, no wizard fuss.

What came across: the whole dictionary

Now look at what landed. The column headers show the variable labels — the friendly descriptions, not the terse variable codes. The cells show value labels — coded answers rendered as the words they stand for. And the user-missing values are treated as missing, set aside rather than counted. All three features that a CSV would have flattened are intact in one view.

Stratum's data grid with an SPSS .sav open: column headers showing variable labels, cells showing value labels, and a user-missing code excluded — Variable labels in the headers, value labels in the cells, a user-missing code held out — the whole dictionary, read directly from the `.sav`.

That last point is the one people forget. If the file declares a "No answer" code and your tool doesn't honour it, that code slips into every count and mean as if it were a genuine value. Reading the dictionary is what keeps a stray sentinel from quietly bending your results.

A first-class dataset, not a lookup puzzle

Because the labels carried through, this is a real dataset the moment it opens — no side lookup table, no mental translation. Run Analyze ▸ Summary for a quick read of every column, and the categorical breakdowns come back in words. Draw a bar chart and its category axis and legend read in value-label words too, not numeric codes. Anywhere the data appears — grids, stats, chart axes, legends — the meaning appears with it.

A bar chart in Stratum whose category axis and legend read in value-label words rather than numeric codes — A summary or a chart on the imported columns: categories read as words, because the value labels came across intact.

Send it back out: spreadsheet or PDF

Need the results somewhere else? Export the data as a clean spreadsheet — CSV or XLSX — for whoever needs the numbers. Export your report as a PDF (or plain text) to circulate the analysis. The point of the import was to stop losing meaning at the door; the export keeps that discipline going out the other side.

Where Stratum actually pulls ahead

Opening the file is table stakes — worth doing well, but not the reason to reach for Stratum. The reason is what happens after the import. An SPSS licence is costly, and the free readers get you a labelled grid and not much of a modern analysis suite around it. Stratum reads the same .sav on both Mac and Windows, then puts a fast, native app around it: up to 5 million rows, 30-plus chart types, ANOVA and regression, SPC control charts, machine learning, a published validation record, and polished export. No SPSS licence, no CSV round-trip, no code.

So if a .sav is sitting in your inbox, you don't need to buy anything or track down another tool. Open it, keep every label and missing code, and get straight to the analysis.

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