SPSS is software for editing and analyzing all sorts of data. These data may come from basically any source: scientific research, a customer database, Google Analytics or even the server log files of a website. SPSS can open all file formats that are commonly used for structured data such as

  • spreadsheets from MS Excel or OpenOffice;
  • plain text files (.txt or .csv);
  • relational (SQL) databases;
  • Stata and SAS

SPSS Data View

After opening data, SPSS displays them in a spreadsheet-like fashion as shown in the screenshot below from freelancers.sav.

SPSS - What Is It? - Data View

This sheet -called data view- always displays our data values. For instance, our first record seems to contain a male respondent from 1979 and so on. A more detailed explanation on the exact meaning of our variables and data values is found in a second sheet shown below.