The description below is adapted from the unofficial description in Appendix A of the PSPP Developers Guide. Its form reflects the origin of SPSS as a batch-processing system using 80-column punched cards to submit data and analysis procedures to mainframes. The SPSS Portable format was designed primarily to support short-term transfer of datasets between versions of SPSS and not for long-term archiving. The compilers of this resource have not determined whether this means that the ability to create a file in the SPSS_por_ASCII format is to be dropped. The Overview of the Export command for version 24 of SPSS, released in 2016, states that the Export command is now deprecated. sav files had been platform-independent since SPSS version 6.0, which PC Magazine, Jindicates was current in 1994. See, for example, a discussion thread, which suggests that SPSS. 22) command reference for the Export command, 'All variables from the active dataset are written to the portable file, with variable names, variable and value labels, missing-value flags, and print and write formats.' The same page also states, 'In most cases, saving data in portable format is no longer necessary, since IBM SPSS Statistics data files should be platform/operating system independent.'Īs early as 1999, experts on discussion forums were recommending the use of the native SPSS Statistics 'system' (.sav) files for data interchange instead of. The SPSS Portable file format is generated by the Export command in the SPSS software. Unicode has been supported for character data in the SPSS application since version 16 (released in late 2007) however the SPSS Portable format does not support Unicode. See Notes below for discussion of how the other encodings are supported in SPSS Portable files.

This description focuses on the most widely used ASCII encoding and will use the name 'SPSS_por_ASCII' for specificity. The format was designed to support various character encodings, including ASCII and EBCDIC. The format, for which there is no official public specification, was designed as a portable format for data transfer to versions of SPSS on other operating systems. When an SPSS Statistics Portable file is exported from SPSS, the file extension. SPSS has been owned by IBM since 2009 and is now known as IBM SPSS Statistics. SPSS, which originally stood for 'Statistical Package for the Social Sciences,' is a widely used statistical software system, first released in 1968. The SPSS Statistics Portable File Format is a proprietary format, developed and maintained as part of the SPSS statistical software application. SPSS Statistics Portable File Format (.por), ASCII encoding

Spss portable