http://www.spss.com/ is the main link to the SPSS web site

http://support.spss.com/ is the part of their web site for technical support. You must sign in to get full access to this part of the site. Named access is only available to registered non academic users. But anyone can access information by logging in as guest with password guest.

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/ is a site at UCLA with some resources to help you with SPSS as well as links to other sources of help.

You need to have an up-to-date license to run SPSS . Licenses are negotiated annually and can include different parts of the SPSS system. All licenses cover the main statistical procedures in the BASE package. SPSS COMPLEX SAMPLES, for survey analysis, is an add-on module. The pricelist for commercial organisations can be accessed here.

SPSS is available at reduced prices to academic organisations in the UK via CHEST and the current CHEST prices can be accessed here.

SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was developed for social scientists. Its emphasis has always been towards ease of use. Its statistical procedures tend to have had less input from professional statisticians than other packages.

Many SPSS users run their analyses via the point-and-click interface only without keeping a record of what has been done. It is much better practice to keep a record via a SYNTAX file. This allows more flexibility in data manipulation.

• It is easy to learn and to get started
• Use of the syntax window with PASTE operations is a good way to keep an audit trail
• It is so commonly used that lots of informal help is available

• The documentation of the statistical procedures is sketchy and it may be difficult to find out what they are doing (but see below under algorithms).
• Pointing and clicking is so easy that it may be hard to be organised.