using SPSS

I had to create a survey for a class of mine. All of the responses were recorded using google docs. From google docs I had to export everything to excel. And then from excel I imported (or exported?) everythng into SPSS.

I was able to recode all of the original responses (i.e. male=1, female=2, etc) the way the teacher wanted us to. And now there's a few items from the scales I used that need reverse scoring (1 becomes 5, 2 becomes 4, etc.) before I can score the scales. But I keep running into problems when I try to reverse score my newly recoded variables.

The first error I got was that SPSS said i could only recode string variables. So I changed the numeric data to be labeled as string data and tried again. When I tried to recode into the same variable nothing happened, no changes. And when I tried to recode into different variables I got a whole column with nothing but a decimal point.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I'm guessing I must be missing some step along the way. I tried googling tutorials but I'm following the instructions on the ones I can find and still nothing.