import spss por file

[paulvonhippel]

I have data in SPSS portable format (.por). Is there a way to import this to Stata? The import spss command seems to expect a .sav file.

[Rich Goldstein]

you can certainly do it using StatTransfer (stattransfer.com)

[paulvonhippel]

StatTransfer is a $249 package, doesn't seem worth it to import a single file.

I'm hoping there's something free that runs on the Stata command line?

Best,
Paul

[Mike Lacy]

I can't tell for sure, but this online tool might work https://gallery.shinyapps.io/rioweb/ It's very convenient to use, but you couldn't call it from the command line and I can't tell if it recognizes *.por files

Barring that, I'd say that for a single file, and considering that Paul is a known member on StataList, perhaps someone here has SPSS installed and would import the file in SPSS and at least translate it to the *.sav format for him. I don't have SPSS myself.

[paulvonhippel]

That's a cool web app, but I don't think it takes .por files. Many thanks!

[Andrew Musau]

Try the haven package in R: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packa...ven/index.html

[paulvonhippel]

Unfortunately I'm having trouble getting the desired results out of the R package haven.

Sign of the times, I suppose, that my query to Statalist elicited two solutions using R. Is there no Stata command that can import a .por file?

Best,
Paul

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

I’m not at all an SPSS user, but if it’s a one-off conversion you need I do have access to StatTransfer so I can try that. Send me a PM if you’d like.

[paulvonhippel]

That's a nice offer, thanks. I'm not sure how to PM, but here's the data:
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/DSDR...190/variables#

[daniel klein]

Sign of the times, I suppose, that my query to Statalist elicited two solutions using R. Is there no Stata command that can import a .por file?

Perhaps this is not so much a "failure" of Stata not supporting an arcane SPSS format that even SPSS seems to deprecate and that is not documented anywhere, as it is a failure of ICPSR still offering such a format. By the way, ICPSR lists ASCII and SAS as alternative formats to SPSS. Stata has imported delimited and import sas -- just a thought.

[paulvonhippel]

All good points. Indeed the available formats are antiquated. Unfortunately the SAS download is just SAS code for reading the ASCII file, and the ASCII file has a fixed-width format with no column headers, so it can only be read with code.

Leonardo Guizzetti did me the good turn of converting the file to .dta, and I have sent it to ICPSR in hopes that they will post both a .dta file and a tab-delimited text file with column headers.

[David Radwin]

One more suggestion, for future reference, is the open source program PSPP that reads and writes SPSS .sav and .por files. https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp