 The next step in SPSS and introduction and setting up is simply taking a look at SPSS and seeing what the program's like. And the easiest way to do that is to just open it up. When you first open SPSS, you'll get this introductory splash screen that gives you an opportunity to open up some files, recent files and learn more about various things that you can get from SPSS. If you want to, you can click on this box, don't show this dialogue in the future, then you won't have to deal with it again. You can also just press cancel. And that brings you to the data window in SPSS, which has a lot in common with a spreadsheet. It has these rows and columns, where you have one row per case and one column per variable. But there's some very important differences between SPSS and a spreadsheet. To demonstrate this, I'm going to open up a data set that I've used recently. And then when this opens up, you see that it does resemble a spreadsheet, we have the variable names across the top. We have row numbers down the bottom and we have data in the middle. Now, one important difference between SPSS data window and a spreadsheet is this, you have a data view, but you also have something called a variable view. And it's the same data set. But if we click on it, we see it in a different way. Each of the variables has metadata associated with it. So for instance, age, it tells you the type of the variable. Now, these are mostly numeric. There's a string variable, but you can see there's a lot of choices here, numeric, common dot and so on. You also can specify the width of the variable, the number of decimal places. And then a really important thing that makes SPSS different from most other programs is the use of labels. This column right here shows variable labels. And the idea is we have a short one word variable name over here on the left. And if you use a very old version of SPSS, they were limited to eight characters. And you ended up sometimes with very cryptic names, you don't have quite the same restrictions anymore. But what's common is to give a short name to the variable. And then to give it a label that is more descriptive. In addition, you can have value labels. So let's come here to marital. And we click on this. And this is a way of telling SPSS that in that column zero means unmarried and one means married. Obviously, you can make them whatever you want. And when you come back here, you have the option of seeing them. So I'm going to come right up here. And I'm going to click on this one, which will show the value labels. And you see how they've appeared now, I can have them go away. And with the variables, if I just hover over, then I see the longer name. Going back to variable view, you can also specify values for missing values, you can give the width of the column, the alignment. And then you can specify the scale of the rephrase. And then you can specify the level of a measurement. Now SPSS uses three values, scale, which is a interval or ratio level measured variable, ordinal, which is ranked data, and nominal, which is categories. You also have the option of specifying whether something is an input variable, a target variable, or both. And there are certain functions that use those, but most of the time that's not a big deal. And you see that in this demonstration data set, those haven't been changed at all. So the first window in SPSS is this data window. But there's more to SPSS than that. So for instance, let's make a very quick graph. I'm just going to make a simple chart here. I'm going to make a histogram of age. And hit OK. And so you see, I have a graphical user interface with drag and drop menu. So it allows me to assemble my commands this way. I hit OK. And then what we get is another window that opens up. It's super tiny up here. So I'm going to make it much bigger. And this is the output window. So it's a separate window, the data is in one window. And when you do an analysis, you get a separate output window, you can actually have multiple output windows. And what this one does is it has the graph or any statistical analysis we do. It also has a table of contents over here that you can collapse things or you can expand them. And an important thing is I've got it set. So it shows the code that SPSS generates behind the scenes to create this analysis. And the neat thing about that is you can actually use that code and you can manipulate it directly. This code is called syntax in SPSS. Now by default, SPSS opens up only a data window and an output window. But you can get a syntax window as well. In fact, let me do that. I'm going to come up to file new and syntax. And this is a very blank window. But it's one that you can type in. Or you can also use the drop down menus to put a command in there. So I'm going to come back here to the recent command. And I did a histogram. And I could press okay, again, but now what I'm going to do is I'm going to press paste. And what that's going to do is is going to get the code for that chart, and it's going to put it right here. In fact, this is the part that we use. And if I select that, I can hit run, I can also do command or control R. It runs the selection. And you'll see we get the output window again. And it's done the exact same thing a second time. But this time, it did it from a window where I'm able to have the text. Now a lot of people are uncomfortable with syntax and they like the drag and drop menus. But a really important thing about this is it allows you to save your analysis. So you can repeat it again, without having to go through all the menus, you can simply paste the syntax from the dialogues into a syntax file. And then you can repeat it as many times as you want. It's also really easy to modify things when you do it that way. And syntax files are just plain text files, they're saved with the dot SPSS extension. But they read just like plain text files. Now these are the most important elements of the SPSS environment, the data window was both the data and the variable view, the output windows, and the syntax windows that allow you to save the commands. And this is what gives SPSS both some of its flexibility and its power. And as you become more comfortable, moving back and forth between these various windows, and seeing what you're able to do, both with the drag and drops, and by typing text, you'll discover there's a great amount of flexibility and power in SPSS that can allow you to do the analyses you need to do and get the insight you want from your data.