2.5 Loading Data in jamovi

There are several different types of files that are likely to be relevant to us when doing data analysis. There are two in particular that are especially important from the perspective of this book:

  • jamovi files are those with a .omv file extension. This is the standard kind of file that jamovi uses to store data, and variables and analyses.
  • Comma separated value (.csv) files are those with a .csv file extension. These are just regular old text files and they can be opened with many different software programs. It’s quite typical for people to store data in .csv files, precisely because they’re so simple.

There are also several other kinds of data files that you might want to import into jamovi. For instance, you might want to open Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (.xls files), or data files that have been saved in the native file formats for other statistics software, such as SPSS or SAS. Whichever file formats you are using, it’s a good idea to create a folder or folders especially for your jamovi data sets and analyses and to make sure you keep these backed up regularly.

Loading Data from .csv Files

One quite commonly used data format is the humble “comma separated value” file, also called a .csv file, and usually bearing the file extension .csv. The .csv files are just plain old-fashioned text files and what they store is basically just a table of data. This is illustrated in Figure 2.5.1, which shows a file called booksales.csv. As you can see, each row represents the book sales data for one month. The first row doesn’t contain actual data though, it has the names of the variables.

 

A screenshot of a csv data file titled booksales
Figure 2.5.1. The booksales.csv data file

It’s easy to open .csv files in jamovi. From the top left menu (the button with three parallel lines) choose ‘Open’ and browse to where you have stored the .csv file on your computer and navigate to that file. 

 

An animated image that opens the booksales.csv datafile in jamovi
Figure 2.5.2. Opening the booksales.csv in jamovi

Loading SPSS Files

Since SPSS is probably the most widely used statistics package in psychology, it’s worth mentioning that jamovi can also import SPSS data files (file extension .sav). Just follow the instructions above for how to open a .csv file, but this time navigate to the .sav file you want to import. For SPSS files, jamovi will regard all values as missing if they are regarded as “system missing” files in SPSS. The “Default missings” value does not seem to work as expected when importing SPSS files, so be aware of this.

Loading Excel Files

The way to handle Excel files is to open them up first in Excel or another spreadsheet program that can handle Excel files, and then export the data as a .csv file before opening/importing the .csv file into jamovi.

Chapter attribution

This chapter contains material taken and adapted from Learning statistics with jamovi by Danielle J. Navarro and David R. Foxcroft, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Screenshots from the jamovi program. The jamovi project (V 2.2.5) is used under the AGPL3 licence.

License

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2.5 Loading Data in jamovi Copyright © 2023 by Klaire Somoray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.