The present work is to investigate the correlation between physical properties and deformation behaviors of tablet excipients, and rank them according to their plastic performances during compaction. The excipients selected were compacted using Korsch XP1 after measuring their physical properties where the compression parameters for evaluating deformation behaviors were Heckle equation, compression work and elastic stretch in die. The correlations between compaction descriptors and physical parameters were analyzed by canonical correlation analysis, and factor analysis was simultaneously employed to synthetically assess deformation behaviors for all our samples. The canonical variables show that true density (Pa) correlated negatively with plastic coefficient (PL) and positively with yield pressure (YP); compression degree (Cp) correlated negatively with fast elastic stretch (FES) as well as YP and positively with PL. When factor scores were used in combination with original data, the plasticity of our samples was sorted and ranked as high (-0.56 < F' < 0.21), intermediate (-0.16 < F' < 0.36), or low (0.38 < F' < 0.84), which are in accord with plasticity rankings previously reported in literature. This study indicates factor analysis can be an approach to evaluate deformation behaviors of pharmaceutical powders.