Every September it seems like a new and very slightly improved edition of SPSS is released — this year is no exception, and in just a few weeks SPSS 15.0 will hit the streets with a few new minor features that may (or may not) improve the way your charts and graphs look; change the way you organize your data, and even provide you with a few additional statistical tools and programmatic capabilities that you never knew you were missing. So, am I going to rush out to order this new and exciting version? Probably not.
Let me make this clear: I am an avid SPSS user — albeit not a particularly advanced one (I’m definitely an interface guy, not a syntax guy). The program has some excellent capabilities that make it very easy to manipulate and understand my marketing research-related data, and there were many times SPSS Tables has saved me hours of crosstabbing unpleasantness. SPSS is a very well designed data analysis tool with some very advanced capabilities.
With that said, I do have some issues with the way that the software is "enhanced" every year with a major new version. I like new functionality as much as the next guy (perhaps even more than the next guy) but I have to say that for at least the last three years I’ve always stared at the promotional materials from SPSS in puzzlement as I tried to figure out what I was going to get for my relatively hefty upgrade fee. In other words, the "considerable updates" (as SPSS describes the improvements in version 15) just don’t seem all that impressive, and I’m sometimes left to wonder whether, like textbook publishers, the software is simply upgraded for each new school year so that everyone has to buy a new copy in order to stay up-to-date with the teacher.
But of course, that’s just my opinion. You be the judge. Consider the following improvements in SPSS 15 and decide for yourself whether or not you need to upgrade. For myself, I may just wait until version 16 (coming next year?) or possibly even 17.
New Reporting System Functionality: SPSS 15 extends the capabilities of the chart builder by adding a few new graph types and several interface improvements. For example, you can now create graphs that feature two Y axis (an useful capability, but one that has been available in Excel for some time now). You can also create overlay charts which allow you to display two different types of charts (like a bar graph and a line graph) in the same charting space (with one overlayed over the other). SPSS 15 also features more advanced process control charts, and reports can be optimized for export in PDF format.
New Data/Access Management Functionality: A couple of the new data management related features actually strike me as pretty handy. For example, there never used to be any easy way to document each of my variables with custom notes — now there is. In fact, SPSS 15 allows you to create any number of "custom attributes" which can be used any way that you choose. Another particularly useful data management feature is the ability to create "variable sets" which, as far as I can tell, allows you to group your variables into logical sets that can be hidden and retrieved to make working with large numbers of variables more manageable.
For those of you who use SPSS to work with data imported directly from databases, you may find this update particularly useful because now you can easily write your changes back to the database or into a new database. Yes, this functionality was available to those of you fluent in Syntax — but for the rest of us it could be a handy bit of functionality to have available (although I admittedly haven’t personally thought of an actual use for it yet — the last thing anyone needs is for me to clutter up the corporate database).
A couple of other minor improvements: for example, the interface between SPSS and Dimensions has been enhanced, and SPSS will now do certain string/numeric conversions automatically. SPSS also has improved capabilities for exporting data in CSV format.
Improved Analysis Capabilities: SPSS Base 15 now comes with the ability to do ordinal regression (PLUM) which was previously only available in the SPSS Advanced Models add-on module. This procedure allows you to more accurately predict ordinal outcomes with more than two categories. Just in case you thought that might lessen your need to own Advanced Models, that module has been enhanced with generalized linear models and generalized estimating equations which can be used to address a variety of statistical modeling problems. Improvements have also been made to SPSS Regression Models and SPSS Complex Samples. Learn more about the improvements to the add-on modules introduced in 15.0 at the SPSS web site.
Programmability Improvements: SPSS has extended the capabilities of the SPSS Programmability Extension, which was introduced in version 14.0 and has the ability to allow external programming languages, such as vb.NET or the open source Python, to be used to control much of the functionality and capabilities of SPSS Base and even to extend the capabilities of SPSS Base. In SPSS 15, the integration between SPSS and other programming languages is improved and a version of Python is even included on the SPSS Base CD.
No doubt many of these features will appeal to hard core users and people who have been missing specific functionality that is now available. Some of the features, such as the ability to group variables and create variable attributes, are even interesting to me — although not enough to get me to upgrade at this point.