From the course: SPSS Statistics Essential Training (2019)

Sample datasets - SPSS Tutorial

From the course: SPSS Statistics Essential Training (2019)

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Sample datasets

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- [Instructor] The fastest and easiest way to get started with SPSS and to get a feel for what you're able to do is to use one of the built-in sample datasets. Now there are two main ways to get to these. One is through the Welcome dialog. That's what shows by default when you open SPSS. If you've hidden it, then simply go to a data window, go up to the File menu, and then come back down to show the Welcome dialog. The Welcome dialog shows you recent files on the left but if you click on the button on the right, it shows you sample files. Simply click on one of those and get started. Another way to get to those same files is through the file structure on your computer's hard drive. Now the trick is these are a little bit hidden. On a Macintosh computer, they're in Applications, and then it's in the same folder as the SPSS application, which is in the Folder IBM, then SPSS, then Statistics, then 26, or whatever version you have. And then you want to come down here to Samples, and then you get a choice of several different languages. I'm going to click English, and then here you have the sample datasets. Now I'm going to zoom in on that for a second, just so you can see that there are a lot of different kinds of files in here. I'm going to come up here to Kind and click on that. We have a folder with map data. We have several XML files. We have a JPEG. We have an Excel file. Then we have a whole bunch of data documents. Now that's not all that's in there. It turns out that SPSS also includes the output documents, what are called sampling plans, syntax documents which are able to execute commands, and some other XML documents. There are several different kinds of things in here but the data files are going to be the most important ones. Now I have a handful that I'm going to be using as examples throughout this course. One, for instance, that I've already used is this one that is called Demo, and if you double-click on that, it'll open up the demo dataset in the data window in SPSS. And here this is right now. So you can use any of these as a way of getting at some of the functions, and there are good example datasets for each of the different things that you are able to do in SPSS. Play around a little bit. Find something that is useful for you, and then get started seeing how you can do the analysis that you need in SPSS.

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