How to open a .sav file in Excel
Excel has no built-in support for SPSS files: double-clicking a .sav shows gibberish or an import error. The practical route is a quick conversion to .xlsx — and if you do it with a tool that understands SPSS metadata, you keep the labels instead of a wall of numeric codes.
Why Excel can't read .sav directly
A .sav file is a binary format built around SPSS's data dictionary: typed variables, print formats, declared missing values, and label sets. Excel's importers (CSV, text, XML, JSON) have no notion of any of that, so the file needs converting first. The conversion step is also where most of the value hides — a naive dump gives you 1s and 2s where a proper converter can write "Male" and "Female".
Convert .sav to .xlsx in the browser
statfile.tools converts .sav to Excel in three steps: drop the file on the .sav to Excel converter, choose whether coded values should appear as labels and whether dates should be formatted, and download the .xlsx. The workbook contains two sheets: Data, with the values as you chose to render them, and Variables — a dictionary sheet listing every variable's name, label, type, format, and value labels, so nothing from the SPSS file is lost in the move.
The conversion runs entirely in your browser. The .sav file is never uploaded, which matters for survey data and anything covered by an ethics approval; you can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the converter still works.
If you'd rather stay in Excel's world
Once converted, treat the Variables sheet as documentation: freeze the header row of the Data sheet, and use VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP against the Variables sheet if you kept numeric codes and want to map them to labels inside Excel. For repeated workflows, converting to CSV instead of .xlsx makes the output friendlier to Power Query.