SPSS AnswerNet: Result Solution ID: 100000547 Creating an alphabetized active file Description: Q. I want to have the variables in my active file sorted in alphabetical order. A. Try this sample syntax. It uses the FLIP command to transpose only the first case of data. This creates a file with one new variable, called CASE_LBL and one case for each variable. CASE_LBL's contents are the original variable names. We sort this new file by CASE_LBL to get the alphabetic ordering of the variable names. Then we FLIP the file again to get the variables into the alphabetic order. Now create a temporary variable (TMP$$_X here, or you can use another name) in order to match this file to the original one. We use the ADD FILES command to match the files. It's important that we specify the new file first (this is specified by FILE=* in the example below) because the first file listed in the ADD FILES or MATCH FILES commands is the file which defines the dictionary of the resulting file. Therefore, the resulting file will have the variables in the order of the new file we've created. After the ADD FILES command, use the SELECT IF command to drop that single case we created with the alphabetized variable names. Then save the resulting file, dropping the CASE_LBL and temporary TMP$$_X variables. We retrieve this file to see the results. SAVE OUTFILE 'temp.sav'. SELECT IF ( $CASENUM = 1 ). FLIP . SORT CASES BY CASE_LBL . FLIP NEWNAMES= CASE_LBL . COMPUTE TMP$$_X=1. ADD FILES FILE=* / FILE= 'temp.sav'. SELECT IF MISSING(TMP$$_X) . SAVE OUTFILE 'alphasrt.sav' / DROP CASE_LBL TMP$$_X. GET FILE 'alphasrt.sav' . Created on: 04/29/1999