Books and Articles by Aaron Poh

Here's a procedure you can follow to read data from a simple text file into SPSS. The file is named awards.txt. It contains two cases (rows of data) as two lines of text, with the data items in the two lines separated by spaces.Choose File→Read Text Data.Locate the file you want to read. The Open Data window appears.

After defining your variables and entering your data in SPSS Statistics, you may want to check that you have names defined for all your actual ordinal and nominal values, and that you have defined the correct measures for them. SPSS can help by scanning your data, finding values for which you don't have definitions, and pointing them out in a friendly way.

A multiple-response set is much like a new variable made of other variables you already have. A multiple-response set acts like a variable in some ways, but in other ways it doesn't. You define it based on the variables you've already defined, but it doesn't show up on the SPSS Variable View tab. It doesn't even show up when you list your data on the Data View tab.

For IBM SPSS Statistics, you won't have to worry about the minimum requirements for the computer, unless yours is an antique. After all, who doesn't have at least 256MB of RAM and 300MB of free disk space? SPSS comes in a variety of flavors. They're fundamentally alike, but some versions have more parts than others.

Most data you enter in SPSS Statistics will be just regular numbers. Some, however, will be a special type, such as currency, and some will be displayed in a special format. Other data, such as dates, will require special procedures for calculation. You simply specify what type you have, and SPSS takes care of those other details for you.

On the SPSS Statistics Variable View tab, the third column provides a spot to set the width for your variables and the fourth column is where you indicate the number of digits that appear to the right of the decimal point when the value appears onscreen. Width and Decimal settings on the Variable View tab. The width setting in the definition of a variable determines the number of characters used to display the value.

The Values column in the SPSS Variable View tab is where you assign labels to all the possible values of a variable. If you select a cell in the Values column, a button with three dots appears. Clicking that button displays the dialog box shown here. You can assign a name to each possible value of a variable. Normally, you make one entry for each possible value that a variable can assume.

You start entering data into SPSS Statistics in the Data Editor. You use the Variable View tab of the Data Editor window to define the characteristics of your variables. Columns column The Columns column is where you specify the width of the column you'll use to enter the data. The folks at SPSS could have used the word Width to describe it, but they already used that term for the width of the data itself.

Calendar and clock arithmetic can be tricky, but SPSS can handle it all for you. Just enter the date and time in whatever format you specify, and SPSS converts those values into its internal form to do the calculations. Also, SPSS displays the date and time in your specified format, so it's easy to read. SPSS understands the meaning of slashes, commas, colons, blanks, and names in the dates and times you enter, so you can write the date and time almost any way you'd like.