How to Use SPSS - Lesson 2 - Importing External Data

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Mike's SPSS Tutorials Lesson 2

This video series is intended to help you learn how to analyze data using SPSS for your statistical needs. Lesson 2 continues with variable properties by showing how to format the values of a variable in the VARIABLE VIEW. Lesson 2 then covers how to bring in previously created data from other sources into SPSS through a variety of methods and concludes with a simple explanation of how to save SPSS data sets into different formats. These simple methods should help you to be fluid in creating and using data from your own or other sources so further analyses can be done completely within SPSS.

Helpful Notes:

1. Setting value formats is especially important when dealing with coded categorical variables (e.g. gender using 1 for females, 2 for males)

2. Value formats will not show up in your DATA VIEW but will show up in your output. Value formatted variables save space by using coded values in your data view, but help make things easy to read in the OUTPUT WINDOW.

3. SPSS can import many different file types, including SAS, excel, or various text delimited formats. Many of these can be imported using the "File Open Data..." navigation, and following the on-screen data import wizard steps.

4. A slightly more advanced method of importing data is to use the "File Open Database New Query..." navigation, but most of the basic needs of importing data can be done more simply through the Open Data menu.