#INTSALLING PSPP STATISTICS HOW TO#
#INTSALLING PSPP STATISTICS SOFTWARE#
#INTSALLING PSPP STATISTICS CODE#

Here are the choices you will get under Analyze: ANALYZING DATA WITH PSPP Much of your work with PSPP will be done using the Analyze choice on the toolbar. If you have Excel data that you want to bring into PSPP, you should save the Excel file as one of the text formats, like *.csv., and then open that with PSPP. However, PSPP cannot import other file types that SPSS can handle, most notably Excel files. PSPP also can import delimited text files, such as comma-separated or tab-separated files. LOADING DATA PSPP can open SPSS datasets that are in the *sav format. That's where the results of your analyses will appear. There also is a separate second window called the Output Viewer. You can use the Variable View window to set the formats of your data, and also to add text labels for coded variables (such as 1=Male, 2=Female). The Variable View window will show you important details about the variables in your dataset. Notice at the bottom left: There are two tabs - Data View (the one that looks like a spreadsheet) and Variable View. The Rows are numbered, but the columns are named for the variables in the dataset. THE PSPP WORKSPACE Like SPSS, PSPP has a Data Editor window that looks like a spreadsheet - rows and columns. Mac OSX: Go to and download to your desktop the version that matches your flavor of OSX (10.8, 10.7, etc.) You'll get the 'open box' icon on your desktop.ĭouble-click and the installer will start. It should only take a couple of minutes to download and install. Make sure your virus checker is off, and tell it to Run. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I couldn't get the version dated to work it kept crashing. If you're not sure, use the 32bit version. We'll focus here just on MS Windows and Mac OSX: Windows: Go to and click on the 32-bit or 64-bit version, depending on what your operating system is. PSPP is available for most computer operating systems. DOWNLOADING AND INSTALLING PSPP The main PSPP site is at.

#INTSALLING PSPP STATISTICS HOW TO#

This handout explains how to download, install and use PSPP.

#INTSALLING PSPP STATISTICS SOFTWARE#

Happily, the GNU open source software community has cooked up PSPP, a free statistics package that does most of the functions that journalists are likely to want to use. That's just not going to happen in most newsrooms today.

The only problem with SPSS is that it costs thousands of dollars just for the base program, and thousands more for specialized modules like logistic regression. A much easier tool is SPSS, a powerful statistical analysis program with a menudriven graphical user interface.

#INTSALLING PSPP STATISTICS CODE#

One of those tools is R, a free open-source tool - very powerful but with a steep learning curve that requires writing code in a quite-opaque programming language. Excel can be tortured into doing many of these things, but there are better tools for these tasks. Maybe you'll want to calculate how unlikely it is that some outlier test scores could have improved so much just by chance, and not by cheating.

Maybe you will need to compare means and medians and quartiles of a bunch of different numerical variables.

Maybe you will have raw survey results and need to produce a lot of different crosstabs. Using PSPP, the open-source version of SPSS by Steve Doig, Cronkite School of JournalismĪt some point or other, data journalists will run into the limitations of Excel.

Intsalling pspp statistics