SPSS 18 Available
SPSS PASW 18 for Windows (including Windows 7) and Macintosh (including Snow Leopard) is available through the ITS Software Store. Current SPSS subscribers may download 18 for free by logging into the Software Store at http://its.vanderbilt.edu/softwarestore and clicking on “My Software” .
See http://support.spss.com/ProductsExt/Statistics/Compatibility.html and http://www.spss.com/statistics/ for information on system requirements and new features.
Features no longer supported include:
• There is no longer a separate chart editor for “interactive” charts. Charts created from the legacy “interactive” chart dialogs and from IGRAPH command syntax are created in the same format as all other charts and edited in the same chart editor.
• Some features provided in the legacy “interactive” chart dialogs and IGRAPH command syntax are no longer available.
• The Draft Viewer is no longer available.
• You cannot open Viewer files created in previous versions of PASW Statistics (.spo file) in PASW Statistics 18.
• The Maps option is no longer available.
• Dialog interfaces for the legacy procedures in the Trends and Tables option are no longer available. For Trends, this includes the following commands: AREG, ARIMA, and EXSMOOTH. For Tables, this includes the TABLES command. If you have a licenses for either of these options that includes the legacy procedures, command syntax for these commands is still supported.
Known problems include:
Graphics
• Using percentage as the statistic in charts created with the Chart Builder dialog or GPL syntax. There are several choices for the base count for calculating these percentages. If you choose the base to be the total for each legend category, the base is actually the grand total.
Data Access and Data Editor
• Using data files saved in SAS formats in SAS JMP and the SAS Viewer. Data files saved in various SAS formats from PASW Statistics should work in SAS. There are known problems using SAS files saved in PASW Statistics with the SAS Viewer and SAS JMP 5 – these applications have a different mechanism for reading files which isn’t the same or as stable as the one used in SAS.
• Filename limitations for data files saved in SAS formats. The following excerpt is from the SAS JMP 5 README: “Double-byte characters should not be used in filenames when writing SAS files [from within JMP]. This is a limitation of the SAS local data provider that is to be corrected in version 9 of SAS”. This holds true for SAS files saved in PASW Statistics.
• SAS formats and string length limitations. If you use PASW Statistics to open SAS data file types, you may not be able to get string values longer than 255 bytes. If your data contain values longer than 255 bytes, PASW Statistics will get only the first 255 bytes.
• Text Wizard data caching. The Text Wizard provides an optional setting that automatically caches the data that it imports. By default caching is on and the wizard creates a copy of the entire dataset. If you turn caching off, PASW Statistics does not have access to the entire data file — the original data source is re-read as needed — and the total number of cases is unknown. When the total number of cases is unknown, Go to Case, Copy, and Paste do not work as expected in the Data Editor. You can correct the problem by using the File menu to Cache Data.
• Using syntax to read data with ODBC. If you use syntax to read data from a database with ODBC, we recommend caching your data. Caching your data ensures that the data are in the same order each time that PASW Statistics needs to make a data pass. It also ensures that your analysis isn’t affected by updates to the database that occur while the syntax is being processed. To cache the data, add a CACHE command to the syntax immediately after your GET DATA command.
• Syntax files can be saved in Unicode or in the local code page (local encoding). In most cases, when you open a file in the syntax window, PASW Statistics automatically determines the correct encoding. Sometimes it will be wrong. If you see three funny characters at the start of the file, close it and reopen specifying Unicode. If the contents look scrambled, try a different encoding setting. If it still looks wrong, your PASW Statistics locale may be different from the way the file was saved. Use an appropriate SET LOCALE command to resolve this.
Other
• Installation directory and SET LOCALE
In Unicode mode, SET LOCALE specifications of the general form SET LOCALE=language (e.g., SET LOCALE English) will not work if PASW Statistics is installed in a directory path that contains anything other than 7-bit ASCII characters. There are two alternative solutions for this issue:
1. Uninstall PASW Statistics and reinstall in a directory path that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters.
2. Use SET LOCALE specifications of the general form SET LOCALE=language_country, where “language” and “country” are two letter abbreviations. For example, SET LOCALE=en_us or SET LOCALE=ja_jp.
Two-letter language abbreviations adhere to the ISO 639-1 standard:
http://wikipedia.cas.ilstu.edu/index.php/ISO_639
Two-letter country codes adhere to the ISO 3166 standard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1
• Temporary Folder Location
On Macintosh, PASW Statistics checks SPSSTMPDIR and then the macro P_tmpdir, which is defined as the local default temporary file directory.
PASW Statistics uses the first of these that has a value and creates one or more directories within it for each session. That directory and its contents are deleted at the end of the session.
• Double byte characters aren’t properly displayed in PASW Statistics-generated PDF files.
• If you use the Browse button in the Menu Editor to select a syntax or script file for a custom menu item, the value displayed in the Filename field will be enclosed in quotes. You should remove these quotes, otherwise the file will not be found when you use the custom menu item. For syntax files, this problem manifests as an alert of the general form “Cannot start [‘filename’].” For script files, you will see this message in the Viewer window: “No language is configured to execute this script. Cannot run the script.”
• Double-clicking on an .SPV file in the finder on slow PowerPC-based Macs when an PASW Statistics session is not running will launch PASW Statistics but fail to open the .SPV file. In this scenario, PASW Statistics thinks that the file is open. The workaround is to make sure than an PASW Statistics session is running prior to double-clicking on an .SPV file (or to open the .SPV file from within PASW Statistics).
Please contact software.store@vanderbilt.edu if you need more information.