Lesson 0001  ·  DTS 204

Introducing SPSS and Its Four Windows

What SPSS is, the four windows it opens with, and the two you'll actually live in.

§1 What SPSS Is

SPSS stands for the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences — a package of programs for manipulating, analysing and presenting data, widely used in the social and behavioural sciences. The core program is called SPSS Base, and there are a number of optional add-on modules that extend it — more data-entry formats, more statistical procedures, more reporting options.

That's the whole pitch: SPSS is not one thing, it's a base plus whatever modules a given install has added. This course, like the manual and study guide it's built from, only needs SPSS Base.

§2 The Four Windows

SPSS opens onto four separate windows, not one:

• the Data Editor
• the Syntax window
• the Output (Viewer) window
• the Script window

At an elementary level, the Data Editor and Output windows are the ones most used — which is exactly why this course, and every lesson after this one, only goes deep on those two. The Syntax and Script windows exist too — broadly, Syntax is for writing and re-running SPSS commands as code, and Script is for automating SPSS itself — but the source material for this pilot never goes past naming them, so this course doesn't either.

§3 The Data Editor's Two Tabs

Open the Data Editor with File → Open → Data. It has two tabs at the bottom of the window, and which one is active is shown in amber:

• Data View — your actual data. Each row is a case (a record); each column is a variable.
• Variable View — the definition of each variable in your dataset: its name, type, label, and seven more properties. Here each row is one variable instead. Lesson 0002 is entirely about this tab.

Two keyboard shortcuts are worth having in your hands from the start, both in Data View:

• Ctrl+Home — jump to the first cell
• Ctrl+End — jump to the last cell

Pressing Ctrl+Home again after Ctrl+End takes you back to the first cell — a fast way to sanity-check the size of a dataset you didn't build yourself: jump to the end, see how many rows and columns you actually have, jump back.

§4 Where Your Results Land: the Output Viewer

Run any statistical procedure — a descriptives table, a t-test, anything — and SPSS opens a third window for you automatically: the Output Viewer. It has a menu bar and a toolbar like the Data Editor, and is split into two panes: the right-hand pane holds the actual statistical tables, charts, and text output; the left-hand pane holds an outline tree, similar to Windows Explorer's folder view, that lets you jump straight to any piece of output in a long results log.

Two things carry over from ordinary Windows applications, which is by design: you can copy or paste part of the output — or all of it — into another application through the Edit menu, and you can save the whole output log as its own file through File → Save or Save As. An SPSS output file has its own extension, .spv, distinct from a data file's .sav — that distinction matters again in Lesson 0002 when saving comes up properly.

§5 Check yourself

No scrolling back up first — answering from memory, even wrong, tends to stick better than re-reading until the right answer is right in front of you.