East Carolina University
Department of Psychology
Patching SPSS
SPSS typically has a number of bugs that can lead to the following sorts of problems (and more): After saving your data, the file is read-only; changes to a data file cannot be saved; correlation tables are not properly exported to Word; and data exported to Excel are corrupted., transformed variables are corrupted, and so on.
SPSS makes patches available to fix these problems, as they are discovered. About the time you install all of the patches they will release a new version which will have new problems. Get used to it.
In October of 2007 two of my colleagues told me that SPSS declined to allow them to register with online tech support, telling them that their serial number was invalid. Their serial number was not invalid. I contacted SPSS Technical Support about this problem and was provided with another serial number. It also did not use. Using it resulted in a message that students should contact their professor for help. I guess SPSS just does not want faculty to be able to receive proactive email about problems that have been discovered and then patch SPSS to avoid data corruption etc. Another good reason to use SAS instead.
One may be able to login using "guest" as both userid and password, which should allow access to patches, but if one cannot sign up for proactive email how is one to know that there is a problem for which a patch has been released? Without proactive notification one could be corrupting valuable data files for months before happening to login and find that there is a problem that can be patched.
Back to the SPSS Links Page
Contact Information for the Webmaster,
Dr. Karl L. Wuensch