Aaron Poh

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.

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.

The Paired-Samples T Test in SPSS Statistics determines whether means differ from each other under two conditions. For example, you can use this test to assess whether there are mean differences when the same group of people have been assessed twice, such as when determining if an intervention had an impact by using a before and after design.

SPSS has its own format for storing data and writes files with the .sav extension. This file format contains special codes and usually can't be used to export your data to another application. It's used only for saving SPSS data that you want to read back into SPSS at a later time. Several example files in this format are copied to your computer as part of the normal SPSS installation.

If you choose to output a Word document file from your SPSS data, you have no graphic options to set because both text and graphics are included in one output file. The options you can choose from are shown here: whether to include all layers of any tables that may be in the output, whether to include footnotes and captions, and how models are to be handled.

Writing data from SPSS is easier than reading data into SPSS. All you do is choose File→Save As, select your file type, and then enter a filename. You have lots of file types to choose from. You can write your data not only in two plain-text formats, but also in Excel spreadsheet format, three Lotus formats, three dBase formats, six SAS formats, and six Stata formats.

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.

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.

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.