11/19/2015

SPSS Tutorials | SPSS Data Editor Window

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By Ruben Geert van den Berg on October 14, 2014 under 1.1. Getting Started with SPSS.

1.1.2. SPSS Data Editor Window

Introduction
SPSS Data Editor window is SPSS' main window. This is the only window
that's always open whenever we run SPSS. It's recognized by a red icon
in its left top corner.

The Data Editor has two tabs in the left bottom corner: we can click Data
View for inspecting our data values. Alternatively, Variable View shows
information regarding the meaning of our data, collectively known as the
dictionary.

SPSS Data Editor Anatomy

We'll now take a close look at how the Data Editor Window is organized. We
recommend following along by downloading employees.sav. If you have
SPSS installed, you can open this file by simply double-clicking it. After
doing so, you'll see something like the screenshot below (make sure Data
View is selected). We'll walk you through its components.

SPSS Data View

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SPSS toolbars contain some handy tools. Some of their limtations can
be circumvented by building your own toolbars and toolbar tools. Doings so
is utterly simple and speeds up a lot of work.
Columns of cells are called variables. Variable names (gender) are
shown in the column headers.
Rows of cells are called cases. Note that in SPSS, cases refers to
nothing more than rows of cells which may -or may not- correspond to
people or objects.
Data cell contents are called values.
You can drag the three dots
in the right margin leftwards in order to
split the window horizontally. In a similar vein, split the window vertically by
dragging
in the lower margin upwards. Split windows allow for viewing
distant cases or variables simultaneously.
You can toggle between Data View and Variable View by clicking the
tabs in the left lower corner. A faster option is the Ctrl + t shortkey.
The status bar may provide useful information on the data such as
whether a WEIGHT, FILTER, SPLIT FILE or Unicode mode is in effect.
These are the main elements under Data View . We now switch to
Variable View . After doing so, the data editor window should look
somewhat like the screenshot below.

SPSS Variable View

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After selecting Variable View , variables are shown as rows instead of

columns. We're now seeing information about our variables and values
instead of the data values themselves.
Columns now represent variable properties such as label, name and
type.
Cells contain property values. For example, the width of the fourth
variable last_name is 8.

Variable View - Value Labels

Note that some of the information in Variable View is hidden. For instance,
under Values we find the value labels: descriptions of what our data
values represent. Clicking it for education_type displays all value labels for
this variable.

Value Labels for education_type

These value labels tell us that a person with a value of 1 on education_type

indicates somebody who studied Law. In a similar vein, Economy is
represented by a value of 2, and so on. We'll now switch back to data view
for taking a closer look at this.

Value Labels in Data View

Note that the first case in our data was born in 1950 and has a value of 1 on
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education_type . On inspecting this case, you'll probably see something

similar to the next screenshot.

Now click the value labels icon

(or

for older SPSS versions) in the

toolbar area. You'll now see value labels instead of values as shown below.

Conclusion
In this tutorial, we inspected the two tabs of the Data Editor window. Under
Data View we saw our data values (cells), arranged as variables (columns)
and cases (rows). We then inspected the Variable View which shows
dictionary information such as the meanings of variables and the values they
contain. These are the two main components of what we call data
Whenever we save the contents of the Data Editor window, we always save
both main components as a single file. The result of doing so is an SPSS
data file or .sav file after its file name extension.
The SPSS Data Editor window is the first of SPSS' three main windows.
The next tutorial will discuss the second one, the SPSS syntax window.

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This Tutorial has 7 Comments

By John F Hall on July 20th, 2015
1.1.2 Interesting compare this with my Block 1: From questionnaire to SPSS saved file
http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/block-1-from-questionnaire-to-spss-saved-file.html which goes
Show
back even further in the data process. How did you get
the red numbers and boxes to display over
the Data Editor? Nice! In my tutorials I try to use colour-coding for SPSS commands, variable names and for
By Ruben Geert van den Berg on July 20th, 2015
Thanks for your feedback! We'd like to make some adjustments to some of these beginners'
tutorials. Unfortunately, however, we're not going to have the time in order to do within a couple of
months. For now, they'll have to do. But then again, weShow
hope to publish some very interesting new
content during August so do stay tuned!
By Anthony Jusu on July 27th, 2015
I am completely lost. I have to start all over again

By SOPHIE MAKOLOMA on August 2nd, 2015

I downloaded employees.sav but could not drag it into SPSS as expected , i need help to
meaningfully continue.
By Ruben Geert van den Berg on August 3rd, 2015
Are you on a Mac? And which SPSS version are you one? You should be able to drag any .sav file
into the Data Editor window for opening it. Otherwise, double click the file or right click the file and
select "Open with...". Note that this is not a good wayShow
to open data files, we only use it for now
because we haven't learned the proper way (by syntax, that is) at this point.
By Gertrude Gomez on October 17th, 2015
Will reread for continued understanding of the different and many items.

By Saki on November 2nd, 2015

Great job! This is a very good tutorial, complete and very easy to understand.

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