 For many people, their first experience of coding and data science is with the application SPSS. Now, I think of SPSS and the first thing that comes to my mind is sort of life in the ivory tower, though this looks more like, you know, Harry Potter. But if you think about it, the package name SPSS comes from statistical package for the social sciences. Although, if you ask IBM about it now, they'll act like it doesn't stand for anything. But it has its background in social science research, which is generally academic and truthfully, I'm a social psychologist and that's where I first learned how to use SPSS. But let's take a quick look at their web page, IBM.com slash SPSS. If you type that in, that'll just be a alias that'll take you to IBM's main web page. Now, IBM didn't create SPSS, but they bought it around version 16. And it was very briefly known as PASW predictive analytics software that only lasted briefly. And now it's back to SPSS, which is where it's been for a long time. SPSS is a desktop program. It's pretty big. It does a lot of things. It's very powerful. It's used in a lot of academic research. It's also used in a lot of business consulting management and even some medical research. And the thing about SPSS is it looks like a spreadsheet, but it has drop down menus to make your life a little bit easier compared to some of the programming languages that you can use. Now, you can get a free temporary version, if you're a student, you can get a cheap version. Otherwise, SPSS costs a lot of money. But if you have it one way or the other, when you open it up, this is what it's going to look like. I'm showing SPSS version 22. Now it's currently on 24. And the thing about SPSS versioning is in any other software package, these would be point updates. So I sort of feel like we should be on 17.3, as opposed to 22 or 24, because the variations are so small that anything you learn from the earlier ones, it's going to work in the later ones. And there's a lot of backwards and forwards compatibility. So I'd almost say that this one, the version you have practically doesn't matter. You get this little welcome splash screen. And if you don't want to see it anymore, you can get rid of it. I'm just gonna hit cancel here. And this is our main interface looks a lot like a spreadsheet. The difference is you have a separate pane for looking at variable information. And then you have separate windows for output and then an optional one for something called syntax. But let me show you how this works by first opening up a data set. SPSS has a lot of sample data sets in them. But they're not easy to get to and they're really well hidden. On my Mac, for instance, let me go to where they are. In my Mac, I go to the finder, I have to go Mac to applications, to the folder IBM to SPSS to statistics to 22 the version number to samples, then I have to say I want the ones that are in English. And then it brings them up. The dot SAV files are the actual data files. There are different kinds in here. So dot SPS is a different kind of file. And then we have a different one about planning analysis. So there are versions of it. I'm going to open up a file here called market values dot SAV, the small data set in SPSS format. And if you don't have that, you can open up something else, it really doesn't matter for now. By the way, in case you haven't noticed, SPSS tends to be really, really slow when it opens. It also, despite it being a version 24 tends to be kind of buggy and crashes. And so when you work with SPSS, you want to get in the habit of saving your work constantly, and also being patient when it's time to open the program. So here's a data set that just shows addresses and house values for and square feet for some information. This I don't even know if this is real information, it looks, it looks artificial to me. But SPSS lets you do point and click analyses, which is unusual for a lot of things. So I'm going to come up here. And I'm going to say, for instance, make a graph, I'm going to make a gosh, you're going to use what's called a legacy dialogue, to get a histogram of house prices. So I simply click values, put that right there and I'll put a normal curve on top of it and hit okay. And then it's going to open up a new window and it opened up microscopic version of it here. So I'm going to make that bigger. This is the output window. And so this is a separate window. And it has a navigation pane here on the side. It tells me where the data came from. And it saves the command here. And then, you know, there's my default histogram. And so we see most of the houses were right around $125,000. And then they went up to at least 400,000. I have a mean of 256,000, the standard deviation of about 80,000. And there's 94 houses in the data set. Fine, that's great. The other thing I can do is if I want to do some analyses, let me go back to the data just for a moment. For instance, I can come here to analyze. And I can do descriptives, I'm actually going to do, excuse me, I'm going to do one here called explore. And I'll take the purchase price, and I'll put it right here. And I'm going to get a whole bunch of stuff just by default, I'm going to hit okay. And it goes back to the output window. Once again, made it tiny. And so now you see beneath my chart, I now have a table and I've got a bunch of information to stem and leaf plot and I've got a box plot to great way of checking for outliers. And so this is a really convenient way to save things, you can export this information as images, you can export the entire file as an HTML, you can do it as a PDF or PowerPoint. There's a lot of options here, and you can customize everything that's on here. Now, I just want to show you one more thing that makes your life so much easier in SPSS. You see right here that it's putting down these commands is actually saying graph and then histogram normal equals value. And then down here, we've got this little command right here. Most people don't know how to save their work in SPSS and they kind of just have to do it over again every time. But there's a very simple way to do this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to open up something called a syntax file. I'm going to go to new syntax. And this is just a blank window. That's a programming window, it's for saving code. And let me go back to my analysis. I did a moment ago. I'll go back to analyze, I can still get it right here. And descriptives and Explorer. And my information is still there. And what happens here is even though I set it up with drop down menus and point of click, if I do this thing paste, then what it does is it takes the code that creates that command, and it saves it to the syntax window. And this is just a text file. It saves it as dot SPS. But it's a text file that can be opened in anything. And what's beautiful about this is it's really easy to copy and paste. And you can even take this into like word and do find and replace on it. And it's really easy to replicate the analyses. And so for me, SPSS is a good program. But until you use syntax, you don't know the true power of it. And it makes your life so much easier as a way of operating it. And yeah, this is my extremely brief introduction to SPSS. All I want to say is that it's a very common program, kind of looks like a spreadsheet, but it gives you a lot more power and options. And you can use both drop down menus and text based syntax commands as well to automate your work and make it easier to replicate it in the future.