You will often have a .csv file that you would like to use in MPlus. Mplus does NOT read column headers so you will need to delete them before running models in MPlus. Make a copy from your original datafile and edit the new file.

Highlight the column names in excel.

Copy these names into an Mplus script to preserve the order of variables.

Here you can see I’ve pasted my variable names into the VARIABLE argument in MPlus.

I can now return to Excel and delete the column headers for my data set.

My new datafile has no column headers and I can save this file and use it in Mplus.