 The Data Editor window has two tabs at the bottom left, Data View and Variable View. Variable View shows the metadata or data about data. Now every variable is displayed in a row instead of a column. The first column is Name. This is a machine name or short name. It cannot contain spaces or certain punctuation symbols. The label column allows for a better description. This is the friendly name of the variable. It will help you remember what the data means when you come back to this in the future, or if you share the file with other people. Type is usually numeric, but we can have other formats too, such as date and currencies. If your data cannot be represented by categories and is not scalar, then you can use string to refer to text. The number of decimal places and the width, that is the number of positions before the decimal place, can be adjusted here. Value labels can be used to describe the categories for when data is recorded as a numerical value. In this example, 1 represents male, 2 represents female, 8 represents don't know, and 9 represents refusal to answer that question. Missing values are very useful to explain if there are gaps in your data. It can help your analysis to work better by using missing values appropriately. Columns and align simply represent how the fields are displayed in the Data View. The width of each column and the left, centre or right alignment of the values. Measure lets you identify which level of measurement is being used for each variable, out of scale, ordinal or nominal. Although this does not affect the analysis that SPSS can let you perform, it will help you to identify your variables.