How to open a .sav file without SPSS

A colleague, a survey company or a data archive sent you a .sav file, and there is no SPSS licence on your machine. Excel cannot open it at all; R and pandas can, but only with code. Here the file opens by drag and drop, with the value labels the way SPSS shows them.

Open a .sav file Download for Windows

Free to use. The file is read in your browser tab and is never uploaded. Windows version — 4.9 MB, no installation: details. Pro — $29 once: price.

Updated 2026-09-30 · format SPSS/Stata

Options at a glance

Option	What to know
SPSS Statistics	The original, but a paid subscription
PSPP	Free and opens .sav, but has to be installed
R (`haven`) or Python (`pyreadstat`, `pandas.read_spss`)	Reliable, but you write code to see the table
Online converters	The file — often personal survey answers — goes to someone else’s server
A viewer in the browser	Nothing to install, nothing uploaded; filter, sort and export right away

Step by step

Drop the .sav (or .zsav) on the window. The format is recognised by its signature, so a file renamed to .dat still opens.
Check the columns: coded answers show their value labels — “Female”, “Strongly agree” — instead of 2 or 5.
Hover a column in the Fields panel to read its variable label — the question text, such as “Q12. How satisfied are you with…”. Labels also show faintly next to each name.
Filter, sort, group or build a pivot table as with any other table.
Press Export and pick Excel or CSV.

Labels or codes

By default a labelled column shows the labels: that is how a survey table is read. If you need the numbers — for a model, a codebook check or to merge with another file — open Parsing → File parsing and switch off “Value labels instead of codes”. The file is re-read and the columns turn numeric again.

Export writes exactly what is on screen. Want labels in Excel? Export with the switch on. Want codes in a CSV for R or Stata? Switch it off first. A code that has no label in the file (say, 7 where only 1–5 are labelled) is shown as the number itself.

Missing values and dates

System-missing values (the dot in SPSS) are empty cells, so they are not counted as zeros in statistics.
User-defined missing codes (99 — “refused”, −9 — “not asked”) are shown as values, as in SPSS’s Data View; a note above the table lists the columns that have them. Filter them out before averaging.
Dates: SPSS stores seconds since 14 October 1582. Columns with a date format (DATE, ADATE, EDATE, SDATE…) become dates, DATETIME becomes date and time, so sorting and period filters work.

What is supported

Uncompressed and compressed .sav, and .zsav (zlib) from SPSS 21 and later.
Long variable names, strings longer than 255 characters, Unicode files (SPSS 16+ in Unicode mode), and older files in a Windows code page — if text looks garbled, change the encoding in “File parsing”.
Files written by SPSS, PSPP, R haven and Python pyreadstat.

Not supported: the old portable format .por, and writing back to .sav — the file is read-only. Save it as Excel or CSV, or as Parquet for pandas and DuckDB.

Big survey files

A large survey file opens as it is, without converting it first: a compressed file is scanned once on opening, and after that only the rows you look at are decoded. Viewing, filtering and statistics have no limits. The free edition exports up to 5,000 rows at a time; Pro exports everything.

FAQ

Can Excel open a .sav file?

No. Excel has no import for SPSS files. Open the .sav here and export it to .xlsx or CSV — with labels or with codes, as you choose.

Are the value labels kept in the export?

Yes, if they are shown: export writes what you see. Switch labels off in “File parsing” to export the numeric codes instead.

Where do I see the question text?

Variable labels are shown in the “Fields” panel next to each column name and in its tooltip.

Does the file go to a server?

No. The file is parsed inside your browser tab. That matters for survey data with personal answers.

Can I open a .por file?

Not yet. Open it in PSPP or SPSS and save it as .sav — then it opens here.

Your file never leaves your computer. Parsing happens in the browser, in a background thread. The page's security policy forbids sending data to third-party addresses — you can check this in the developer tools. After the first visit the app keeps working offline.

Open the app Download for Windows

Free to use. Your file is not uploaded to a server. Windows version — 4.9 MB, no installation: details. Pro — $29 once: price.