How do I change the names of thousands of variables in SPSS?

Question

I have two SPSS datasets (a & b) that have identical variable names (eg. date, time, etc.). I want to combine them without confusion. Therefore, I want to change the variable names to reflect the dataset it belongs to (a vs. b). How can I add "_a" to all the variable names in dataset a (eg. date_a). I would go through it manually except there are over a thousand variables in each dataset. I would prefer to keep everything in SPSS if possible. Help!

I tried the function below, but SPSS did not seem to like that and provided a lot of error messages indicating it did not recognize my variable names (I double-checked for typos and found none).

RENAME VARIABLES (expName=expName_a) (OS=OS_a) (framerate=frameRate_a) (trial.started.1=trial.started.1_a)

eli-k · Accepted Answer · 2025-06-24 17:20:33Z

Here is a way to do this using SPSS macro language:

* first we define a macro that takes a suffix and adds it to all variables in the list. define renameAll (!pos=!cmdend) !do !i !in(!eval(!allnms)) rename vars !i=!concat(!i,"_",!1). !doend. !enddefine. *once the macro is defined, we can open the file we want to work on. *in the example I assume it is already open and marked as dataset "a" but you can use a get data command here or whatever. dataset activate a. * this will create a list of all column names, stored in a macro called ! allnms. SPSSINC SELECT VARIABLES MACRONAME="!allnms". * now we can run the renaming macro, in this case using the suffix "a". renameAll a.

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