interfacing with SPSS

I have been setting up a multiple response quesitonnaire that asks participants if they have ever had medical complications for their eating disorder. So in the text label in medialab I have put "orthostatic", bradycardic, etc.

When I go to analyze this in spss it records the data as var001 var002 etc. which I believe is due to the length of the variable name. So my first question is (1) Is there a way to have the text label presented to subjects such that I can keep the length of the text in medialab (e.g., bradycardic) but have it shortened when it is dumped into the spss file so that it doesnt' just read var001, var 002 etc but rather something like "bradycar".

My second question is related to the drop down box option in spss. I have not been able to get media lab to interface with the drop down box option in spss using the labels option on variable view. (2) So question #2 is is there a way to use media lab such that it automatically creates data that is read in the drop down box option (e.g., 1 = orthostatic, 2 = bradycardic, etc.) rather than var001 = 1, var002 = 0, var001 = 1 etc.

Thanks

I have been using MediaLab for a few months, and I am not sure if it spss is able to interface with MediaLab, at least not from my experience. What I usually do is open up SPSS and change the name of the variable "var0001" to the label I want it, and save the changes. That way, whenever new data is added on to SPSS, the labels will already be there.

I have a similar question to the original thread here. Is there a setting in MediaLab to automatically keep the data labels (or text labels) associated with each item response (so, rather than recording only a numeric value, I would like it to record BOTH the numeric value and the text in the SPSS data file). Currently I must do this manually, but I would prefer to have MediaLab do it for me to reduce experimenter error. My question is similar to the first posted thread: can you keep the values associated with a scale response item (i.e., 1=male, 2=female) in MediaLab as it writes/records the data into an SPSS data file?

Thank you.