When you say "survey output table" do you mean the cross tabulation table? If in the cross tab the only way I know is to use supercategories, show those categories and then hide the response levels....
When you say "comibine two variables" are you wanting to analyze two questions together or do you want to combine responses such as with supercategories?
For supercategories there is some control as to when to show them, you can show them in the cross tabs, not show them, or just show supercategories using various options. There is a "show supercategories (or a hide) option. There is also a Response Levels option to hide response levels so that you are just left with supercategories.
The help docuemntation has a number of examples that you might find useful (it is lighth on the supercategory info). My bset advice to categorical is experiment with it a bit to figure out the right configurations for what you are looking for. If you can post specific examples of where you are stuck we might be able to better help you - the categroical platform is highly depenent on data structure and which tab you are using, etc. So it is hard to help without seeing where you are stuck.
Karen