reading Systat into R

The SPSS *.SAV file, when I opened it, proved not to have any data in it.
It only contained the "variable view" not the "data view."  But the Excel
file appears to contain the data.

My experience with getting spss files suggests that you might actually be
seeing the file as a list.  Look at help for
?read.spss.  The most usable format to get a data frame is:

dframe=read.spss("MyData.sav",to.data.frame=T)

See if this doesn't do what you expect.