User Guide

78
Chapter 5
E
Double-click a variable name at the top of the column in the Data view, or click the
Variable View tab.
E To define new variables, enter a variable name in any blank row.
E Select the attribute(s) that you want to define or modify.
Variable Names
The following rules apply to variable names:
 The name must begin with a letter. The remaining characters can be any letter,
any digit, a
period, or the symbols @, #, _, or $.
 Var ia bl e n
ames cannot end with a period.
 Var ia bl e n
ames that end with an underscore should be avoided (to avoid conflict
with variables automatically created by some procedures).
 The length of the name cannot exceed 64 bytes. Sixty-four bytes typically means
64 characters in single-byte languages (for example, English, French, German,
Spanish, I
talian, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Arabic, Thai) and 32 characters in
double-byte languages (for example, Japanese, Chinese, Korean).
 Blanks and special characters (for example, !, ?, ‘, and *) cannot be used.
 Each variable name must be unique; duplication is not allowed.
 Reserved keywords cannot be used as variable names. Reserved keywords are:
ALL, AND, BY, EQ, GE, GT, LE, LT, NE, NOT, OR, TO, WITH.
 Variable names can be defined with any mixture of upper- and lowercase
character
s, and case is preserved for display purposes.
 When long
variable names need to wrap onto multiple lines in output, SPSS
attempts to break the lines at underscores, periods, and at changes from lower
case to upper case.