SPSS Overview



This tutorial is an overview of the screen layout in SPSS. A Lotus Screencam file of this tutorial (430 KB) is available. You must have the free Lotus Screen Cam player installed on your computer. This tutorial assumes that you have started SPSS and loaded a data set.

The data window is broken down into a series of columns and rows:

Each column represents the values of a given variable. In this example, several variables are visible: older, younger, gpa, points, major, and pet. To see additional variables, use the scrollbar located at the bottom of the window. Each row represents the values from a given given individual. In this example, we can see data from the first 10 participants. To see the data from additional participants, use the scrollbar located at the right of the window. In this example, the first participant has a value of 0 for older (he or she has no older brothers or sisters), a value of 2 for younger (he or she has two older brothers or sisters), a GPA of 3.60, etc.

Whenever SPSS does calculations, it will display the results in the SPSS Output Viewer which looks like this:

The right hand pane is where you will find all the requested output.

You can return to the data window by clicking on Window | SPSS Data Viewer. To switch back to the output viewer, click on Window | SPSS Viewer.