Summary

This chapter showed you how to read in data from two common file formats--Excel and delimited data. These are common file formats that are writeable by most software, so the ability to read these formats means that you can share data from many other applications.

This chapter also showed you how to save the data as an IBM SPSS Statistics data file. Of course, if you can save a file in that format, then you can use IBM SPSS Statistics to read that file format. The advantage of the SPSS Statistics file format is that the variable information and data are saved in a form that you can access directly. The SPSS Statistics file format is also the native file format of the IBM SPSS Modeler. 

This chapter also discussed variable properties, which you can specify for the variables and then save in the IBM SPSS Statistics file format. Variable properties are important because they produce more informative and aesthetically pleasing tables and charts. In addition, the measure property is used by SPSS Statistics Custom Tables and Chart Builder. 

There are several ways to specify variable properties. We demonstrated adding variable properties to the Variable View via syntax and via define variable properties.

Now that you know how to read your data to SPSS Statistics and establish variable properties, our next step is to learn how to summarize individual data elements using three important procedures: Frequencies, Descriptives, and Explore.