Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
desktop to avoid navigating through your folder hierarchy each time you
want to open SPSS.
A.4 SAVING SPSS FILES
A.4.1 GENERAL ADVICE
You should assume the following will happen to you. After putting in
several hours of work on your computer, and not having saved your work
during that time, the application (e.g., Word, SPSS) locks up or your
computer crashes. As a result, you lose all of the work that you invested.
To avoid this problem, our general advice is to save your work often to
both your internal hard drive and to external media, such as a USB flash
drive. If you get in the habit of saving, it will become much less of a chore.
When you save, choose a name that will quickly tell you enough about
the file to identify it for you. For example,
lengthof studydata
is preferable
to
my data
or
data1
.
A.4.2 SAVING TO SPSS
When an SPSS window is the active window on your desktop (i.e., you can
interact with it in some way such as typing characters, marking checkboxes,
clicking on a pushbutton, or even closing the window), there will be a main
menu bar at the top of the screen (see Section A.10.1).
If the window is new (not yet saved) then to save it you may select
File
➜
Save As
to reach a dialog window that will ask you to name
the file and indicate where you want to save it.
If the window contains an already saved file that you have modified
and you wish to replace the older version with the newer one, then
select
File
➜
Save
.
If the window contains an already saved file that you have modified
and you wish to preserve the old file but also retain the updated or
changed file, then to save it you may select
File
➜
Save As
and give
it a different name than the older file.
Probably the most important type of file to save is your data file. With
access to your data, you can always re-create if necessary statistical analyses
that were performed in the past. If you are typing in data, save often by
using the same data file name so that you replace the older version with the
updated one. Once the data file is complete and error free, save it again. If
you make any changes to it in the course of performing analyses, you can
either save it under the same name (thus replacing the older version) or
use the
Save As
function to save it under a different name (thus preserving
the older version).
A.5 SETTING PREFERENCES
SPSS allows you to set a wide range of preferences to control the manner in
which it displays information. As you become more familiar with the way
