Hi all,

can SPSS delete empty cells?

My problem: I import data from an external software (Superlab 4). To create the relevant variables I have to do some work-around. As a result I get a spss file for each participant, which looks like this:

Before:


I need a way to tell SPSS, that I want to delete the empty cells. This should be the result:

After:


One important note: these are the data from one participant. It should be noted, that the rows vary between participants, where the values are, but the columns are right!

I found an Excel macro to do this (http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/delempty.htm), but Excel has several limitations (255 columns) which are really annoying!

Do you have any idea to solve this?

Thanks in advance!

If there is only one value in each variable for each case, then you can COMPUTE and new variable that gives each case a constant (e.g. COMPUTE overall=1.). Then just aggregate the data, breaking on the overall variable and summarizing all the other variables (or use the FIRST designation). This should give you the data format you're looking for.

Great! Thanks a lot!