SPSS for beginners: quickly locate variables you want when data contains many many variables Video Lecture | SPSS: For Beginners - Data & Analytics

anyhow everyone a real quick tip so
you've got massive data file as in you
have loads and loads of variables here
I've got 672 variables and then if
you're gonna do any analysis it's going
to be a heck of a job finding the
variable you want from that list say I
want to do descriptive stats and
frequency of something alright look say
I want to find something in here for
example gender look at where is it I've
just gone by something which represents
gender okay so I'm going to show you how
look at this how do you sift through all
this it doesn't seem to be some kind of
order it's got R here then it goes to M
then it goes D so it's not in
alphabetical order so you might get some
data set from somewhere which is like
this so you wouldn't have had chance to
enter it enough medical order alright so
here's how what you can do you click on
the inbox here this box here and for any
kind of analysis you have some kind of
box with all the lists of the variables
and you do a right click when you do a
right click the what you have currently
is display variable names what you can
do because the variable names might not
be meaningful to you those you know it's
a short hat it's a kind of short names
you might want to display the labels
what isn't full so you click display
variable labels what happens watch what
happens in the background it now turns
into the labels which is more meaningful
if you've forgotten what you're kind of
the names then these names meant ok what
else can I do I can also sort by a flip
alphabetical order now so this makes
things much easier to find so I go like
this ok now let's look for gender F G
there you go that's quick so I've made
life much easier just do right click
what else can I do you can sort by file
order by measurement level that's
nominal ordinal scale but if you're
gonna do this I think what you'd want is
either display variable names and/or
self sort alphabetically okay and that's
today's tip
thanks for watching