I am writing SPSS .sav files from R using the package haven, which works very well for me in general. However I have noticed that the .sav file size written on disk using write_sav() seems to be much bigger than nescessary. Whenever I open and save a .sav file written by write_sav() in SPSS, the file size is reduced by a factor of up to ~10!
This matters to me as I am writing rather big data to SPSS for others and sometimes SPSS refuses to open a very big file. Maybe this would problem would not arise if write_sav() would store more efficiently in a "real" native SPSS way?
Does anyone know this issue and maybe has a helpful comment on it? SPSS installation is needed to replicate this issue