Is there an easier and less manual way to recode categorical variables into numerical variables?

I tried to use the toggle functionality in the variable settings menu to change categorical scales into numerical scales in Stats IQ for running analysis. For some reason, it lets me toggle between the two, but in practice it does not work. When I try to run a regression analysis on those numerical variables it errors out. The only way for me to currently fix this is to create an entirely new clean variable where I recode the variable into numerical values. This wouldn't be a pain on a smaller survey, but I am trying to do this on a larger relationship survey that has several variables which need recoded. Anyone find a more efficient way to do this?