While working on data holding a record for each day, I wanted to create some graphs on week level. So I extracted the weeks with XDATE.WEEK but the week numbers returned by SPSS are nonsensical: every week starts on January 1 and most years end up with week 53 holding just 1 day. There’s different standards for week […]
Summary SPSS table templates are files that tell SPSS how to style one, many or all tables that appear in the output viewer window. Some examples of such styling are the colors and sizes of fonts and borders. The figure below shows a DESCRIPTIVES table with and without a table template applied to it. Just like SPSS data […]
Having a solid understanding of what SPSS time variables are, you may find calculations on them surprisingly easy. This tutorial will demonstrate SPSS’ main time functions. However, we’ll also show that we often don’t even need them for getting things done. Throughout this tutorial, keep in mind that SPSS time variables contain time spans in numbers of […]
SPSS date variables may seem a bit puzzling at first. However, getting things done fast and accurately with SPSS date variables is not hard at all if you understand some basics. This tutorial will walk you through. You can follow along by downloading and opening hospital.sav. SPSS Date Variables – What Are They? First of all, […]
SPSS FORMATS sets formats -decimal places, dates, percent signs and more- for numeric variables. Setting variable formats in SPSS does not change your actual data values. However, formats determine how your data are displayed -in the data viewer as well as the output-window. Two main uses of FORMATS are increasing or decreasing the decimal places of standard numeric variables; displaying date, time and datetime values (consisting […]
Introduction In SPSS we sometimes find ordinal variables where lower values indicate more positive attitudes or larger quantities. An example is shown in the screenshot below. Now, the coding scheme shown above is not really ‘wrong’ in any way. However, we usually prefer higher values indicating more positive attitudes or larger quantities because we find this more […]
Introduction Working efficiently with SPSS time variables is not hard if you understand some basics. This tutorial walks you through just those. We recommend you follow along by downloading and opening hospital.sav. SPSS Time Variables – What Are They? SPSS time variables are variables that hold time intervals in numbers of seconds. Although the actual time values […]
Summary A previous tutorial covered assembling your own toolbar. This will become even more interesting if you add your own toolbar tools to it. This tutorial quickly walks you through and suggests some best practices. 1. Create a Folder with Syntax and Images Setting Up your SPSS Toolbar Tools Like so may Speed Things Up […]
Summary Toolbars can be very useful in SPSS. They allow users to do a lot of stuff with a single mouse click. However, some users may feel there’s some limitations to their default configuration. An ideal way to get around these is to assemble your own toolbar. Some limitations of standard toolbars Most users will […]
SPSS date calculations are much easier than they may seem at first. The first key to success is understanding what SPSS date variables really are. Next, choose (and possibly combine) the right date functions. This tutorial will walk you through the main ones. We recommend you follow along by downloading and opening hospital.sav. SPSS Main Date Functions The table […]
