SPSS Chart Templates Tutorial

SPSS chart templates are tiny text files that contain styling for charts. What are SPSS Chart Templates? Creating a Chart Template Applying Chart Templates Where do I Get Some Decent Chart Templates? Developing Your Own Chart Templates Practice Data File This tutorial walks you through creating and using chart templates. We’ll use bank.sav -partly shown below- throughout. […]

SPSS Output – Basics, Tips & Tricks

SPSS Output Tables SPSS Output Charts SPSS Output to WORD SPSS Output to Excel SPSS Output Tricks Exporting SPSS output is usually easier and faster than copy-pasting SPSS Output Introduction In SPSS, we usually work from 3 windows. These are the data editor window ; the syntax editor window ; the output viewer window . Our previous tutorials discussed the data […]

SPSS Data Analysis Roadmap

Set Up Project Folder and Open Data; SPSS Data File Inspection; SPSS Categorical Variable Inspection; SPSS Metric Variable Inspection; Optionally: Edit Data; Choose and Run Tables/Charts/Tests. 1. Set Up Project Folder and Open Data The biggest waste of time and effort in SPSS is probably not keeping projects organized. A related pitfall is not regularly making backup copies of the entire […]

SPSS EXECUTE – What and Why?

EXECUTE runs pending transformations but many SPSS users don’t have a clue what that means. More importantly, when should you (not) run EXECUTE? And when do you really need it? Let’s dive in. We’ll use adratings.sav throughout, part of which is shown below. SPSS “Transformations Pending” As you probably figured out, our data hold 18 respondents who rated 3 different advertisements. […]

SPSS – How to fix “Your license will expire in … days”?

I’m a pretty happy SPSS user but since a while, the software has been telling me that “Your license will expire in … days.” I had already extended my license with another year but -apparently- SPSS seemed to be oblivious to that. It took me some trial and error to troubleshoot the issue. Since I’m running this […]

Convert String Date to SPSS Date Variable

“I’ve a string variable in my data holding dates formatted as ‘01JAN2016’ without separators between the day, month and year components. To make things worse, the month abbreviations are in Dutch and 3 of those differ from their English counterparts. How can I change this string into an SPSS date variable?” Step 1: Add Separators […]

SPSS – Create All Scatterplots Tool

Creating a scatterplot in SPSS is pretty straightforward. However, I sometimes like to take a quick look at all scatterplots among a set of variables. So I created a simple tool that creates all of them in one click. All Scatterplots Tool – Download and Install First off, make sure you have SPSS version 18 or higher with the SPSS Python Essentials properly installed […]

SPSS Tools – Overview

All tools on this page can be used from SPSS’ menu via a dialog window or by syntax. Our newest tools come as SPSS extensions and some older tools are SPSS Custom Dialogs.Some of these tools require SPSS version 17 or 18 with the SPSS Python Essentials in order to work. If so, this’ll be clearly indicated. We recently moved […]

SPSS Data Preparation 4 – Specify Missing Values

5. Presence of User Missing Values (Overview and data file are are found here) User missing values are values that we want to exclude from analysis. We do so by specifying (ranges of) values as “missing” in SPSS. For ordinal variables, we typically exclude answers such as “Don’t know” or “Not applicable”. For metric variables, we exclude values that are not […]

Data Preparation

Before you start analyzing real-world data, make sure you have a basic idea what your data look like. How many cases and variables do you have? Do their frequency distributions look plausible? Do you have any string variables and do you need to set any missing values? A quick data inspection takes little time and effort and may save you […]

SPSS Data Preparation 1 – Overview Main Steps

When we start analyzing a data file, we first inspect our data for a number of common problems. For instance, we want to be sure that variables have the right formats, don’t contain any weird values and have plausible distributions. The table below proposes which steps should be taken and in which order. For getting […]

SPSS – Convert String into Date Variable

For converting string variables to date variables, ALTER TYPE is the way to go. This tutorial demonstrates how to do this and points out a couple of caveats. For those who can’t use ALTER TYPE, we’ll propose some alternatives. SPSS Alter Type The syntax below first creates a mini dataset holding 8 string variables. They demonstrate the 8 most common date formats. Next, […]

SPSS String Variables Basics

For working proficiently with SPSS string variables , it greatly helps to understand some string basics. This tutorial explains what SPSS string variables are and demonstrates their main properties. We encourage you along by downloading and opening string_basics.sav. The syntax we use can be copy-pasted or downloaded here. SPSS String Variables – What Are They? String variables are one […]

SPSS Chart Templates

SPSS chart templates are files that tell SPSS how to style charts in the Output Viewer window. SPSS chart templates are easy to use and make your SPSS output look very professional. SPSS chart templates are files that tell SPSS how to style one, many or all charts that appear in the output viewer window. Examples […]