What's New in Version 12.0 of SPSS.
In November 2003, we received version 12.0 of SPSS. This is a major enhancement to SPSS with several important changes.
Changes to variable names
SPSS used to have serious restrictions on the names of variables that you could use. In particular, names could be no longer than 8 letters and they could not distinguish between upper case and lower case. Both restrictions are now gone. So, for example, you could have variables with the names:
- XX,
- Xx, and
- xx.
You can also name variables up to 64 characters long (only 32 characters if you use Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters).
You still cannot use blanks or most special symbols. Two exceptions are the underscore character (_) and the dot (.), though be sure not to end any variables names with either of these. You might be tempted to use the dash (-) or the slash (/), but these are still not allowed.
You have several reasonable choices for naming variables. First, you can use an initial capital for each "word" in the variable name
- BirthWeightInGrams
Second, you can separate the "words" using a period or an underscore
- birth.weight.in.grams
- birth_weight_in_grams
Third, you can continue to use clever abbreviations
- bw
- bwt
- birthwt
There's nothing to prevent you from combining these approaches
- birth_wt
- Birth_Weight_In_Grams
Changes to graphics
The graphics in SPSS have improved greatly and you can now produce graphs that are publication quality in many ways, though you still do not have all of the options that a program like SigmaPlot gives you. You will notice the quality of the graphs almost immediately. The default options are much more intelligently selected.
The chart editor window has had a major overhaul (see above). There is now a button for annotations (the icon directly under the cursor), and for text boxes (the icon directly to the right). When you double click on a data point, SPSS produces a new dialog box that allows you a greater level of control over the size, shape, and color of the markers.
Notice that the graphs now have a margin at the corners. Previous versions of SPSS could only draw the corner of the graph at a tick mark, which sometimes led to some bad choices for the axes. A margin allow the corner to go a little bit lower than the smallest tick mark (by default 5%) so that data points aren't clipped in half if they are exactly at this tick mark. When you double click on the axis in a graph, you get an updated dialog box that controls the range of the axis, the tick marks and the margin at the corners.
You can also fit several types of regression lines, just as before, but you do this by selecting one of the data points and then selecting CHART | ADD CHART ELEMENT | FIT LINE AT TOTAL from the menu.
You can also control the font type, the size, and the color of any text on the graph and can use bold or italics as needed.
Other important changes
SPSS has made it easier to find duplicate cases in a data file. You select DATA | FIND DUPLICATE CASES. There are a wide range of options, which I won't discuss, but you can get a feel for this by looking at the dialog box.
SPSS also makes it easier to recode continuous variables into categories. Select TRANSFORM | VISUAL BANDER from the SPSS menu.
You will see a histogram of values that will allow you to group the data intelligently.
This webpage was written by Steve Simon on 2003-11-11, edited by Steve Simon, and was last modified on 2008-07-08. Send feedback to ssimon at cmh dot edu or click on the email link at the top of the page.