Really
what I want is to convert wide data to long. Which SPSS can
do. As I don’t want to teach the students two packages, I
think I will teach them how to manipulate the data in excel
first and then read it in.
I think you're right regarding wide and long "formats" (also
calles structures, layouts, and so forth). Stata seems to have the
"reshape" command for that. Maybe we could expand on Allin's code
suggestion to offer (eventually) a tool to help with the
conversion.