SPSS means “Statistical Package for the Social Sciences” and was first launched in 1968.
Since SPSS was acquired by IBM in 2009, it's officially known as IBM SPSS Statistics but most users still just refer to it as “SPSS”.
SPSS - Quick Overview Main Feature
SPSS is software for editing and analyzing all sorts of data. These data may come from basically any source: scientific research, a customer database,
SPSS can open all file formats that are commonly used for structured data such as
– Plain text files (.txt or .csv)– Relational (SQL) databases– Stata and SAS.
An SPSS data file always has a second sheet called variable view. It shows the metadata associated with the data.
Metadata is information about the meaning of variables and data values. This is generally known as the “codebook” but in SPSS it's called the dictionary.
For non SPSS users, the look and feel of SPSS’ Data Editor window probably come closest to an Excel workbook containing two different but strongly related sheets.
Data Analysis
Right, so SPSS can open all sorts of data and display them -and their metadata- in two sheets in its Data Editor window.
For instance, if our data contain a variable holding respondents’ incomes over 2010, we can compute the average income by navigating to Descriptive Statistics