User Guide

Chapter
6
Data Prepara
tion
Once you’ve opened a data file or entered data in the Data Editor, you can start
creating reports, charts, and analyses without any additional preliminary work.
However, there are some additional data preparation features that you may find
useful, including:
 Assign variable properties that describe the data and determine how certain
values should be treated.
 Identify cases that may contain duplicate information and exclude those cases
from analyses or delete them from the data file.
 Create new variables with a few distinct categories that represent ranges of values
from variables with a large number of possible values.
Varia ble Properties
Data simply entered in the Data Editor in the Data view or read into SPSS from an
external file format (for example, an Excel spreadsheet or a text data file) lack certain
variable properties that you may find very useful, such as:
 Definition of descriptive value labels for numeric codes (for example, 0 = Male
and 1 = Female).
 Identification of missing values codes (for example, 99 = Not applicable).
 Assignment of measurement level (nominal, ordinal, or scale).
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