paste

The Joy of Pasting SPSS Syntax

October 14th, 2013 by

Every so often I point out to a client who exclusively uses menus in SPSS that they can (and should) hit the Paste button instead of OK. Many times, the client never realized it was there.

I am here today to tell you that it is there, and it is wonderful.  For a few reasons.

When you use the menus in SPSS, you’re really taking a shortcut.  You’re telling SPSS which syntax commands, along with which options, you want to run.

Clicking OK at the end of a dialog box will run the  menu options you just picked. You may never see the underlying commands that SPSS just ran.

If instead you hit Paste, those command won’t automatically be run, but will instead the code to run those commands will be (more…)