Accessing Help While You Work in IBM SPSS Statistics

To improve your experience using IBM SPSS Statistics, the Version 1 SPSS experts have created various Tech Tips. This Tech Tip shows how to access help while you are working.  

In IBM SPSS Statistics, you can work inside a single, integrated interface to run descriptive statistics, regression, advanced statistics, and machine learning models. You can create publication-ready charts, tables, and decision trees in one tool. IBM SPSS Statistics is easy to use, provides analysis automation, comprehensive statistical tools, integration with open source, and help at your fingertips.  

When working in IBM SPSS Statistics, users often want information on various procedures and statistics. Help is at your fingertips in SPSS, and support can be found throughout the tool. In IBM SPSS Statistics, users select procedures from menus. Once a procedure is selected, a dialog box pops up. In the box, a Help button allows SPSS users to obtain help and information quickly.  

For example, a user needs to run a frequency procedure. They will go to the Analyze menu and select Descriptive Statistics. Here, they choose the Frequencies procedure. Once this procedure is selected, a dialog box pops up. The list of variables appears on the left side of the box. The variables needed for analysis are then moved into the Variable(s) box. The buttons to the right provide options for the analysis. The buttons below allow users to run the procedure, paste the syntax, reset the dialog box, cancel the procedure, and obtain help. 

Clicking the Help button provides information on the Frequencies procedure and an example of obtaining a frequency table. Clicking the Statistics button in the Frequencies dialog box offers statistics that can be selected for this procedure. Once the Frequencies Statistics box pops up, a Help button is available with information on all statistics. This example shows that help is available throughout procedures in SPSS.