PSPP Changelog

What's new in PSPP 2.0.1-2

Mar 25, 2024
  • Bug fixes.
  • Translation updates.

New in PSPP 2.0.0-1 (Jan 5, 2024)

  • The CTABLES command is now implemented.
  • FREQUENCIES now honors the LAYERED setting on SPLIT FILE.
  • ADD FILES, MATCH FILES, and UPDATE now allow string variables with the same name to have different widths.
  • CROSSTABS now calculates significance of Pearson and Spearman correlations in symmetric measures.
  • DISPLAY MACROS is now implemented.
  • SET SUMMARY is now implemented.
  • SHOW ENVIRONMENT is now implemented.
  • Removed the MODIFY VARS command, which is not in SPSS.
  • Building from a Git repository, which previously required GIMP, now requires rsvg-convert from librsvg2 instead.
  • The pspp-dump-sav program is no longer installed by default.
  • Improved the search options in the syntax editor.
  • Localisations for the ar (Arabic) and ta (Tamil) locales have been added. Other translations have been updated.
  • Journaling is now enabled by default when PSPP or PSPPIRE is started interactively. In PSPPIRE, use Edit|Options to override the default.
  • AGGREGATE:
  • New aggregation functions CGT, CLT, CIN, and COUT.
  • Break variables are now optional.

New in PSPP 1.6.2-2 (Jul 5, 2022)

  • Bug fixes.

New in PSPP 1.6.1 (Jul 5, 2022)

  • The SET command now supports LEADZERO for controlling output of a leading zero in F, COMMA, and DOT format.
  • Bug fixes and translation updates.

New in PSPP 1.6.0-1 (Jun 17, 2022)

  • In the Kruskal-Wallis test, a misleading result could occur if the lower bound specified by the user was in fact higher than the upper bound specified. This has been fixed.
  • The DEFINE, MATRIX, MCONVERT, and MATRIX DATA commands are now implemented.
  • An error in the displayed signficance of oneway anova contrasts tests has been corrected.
  • Added Drag-N-Drop in output view.
  • The Explore GUI dialog supports the "Plots" subdialog. Boxplots, Q-Q Plots and Spreadlevel plots are now also available via the GUI.
  • The graphical user interface for importing spreadsheets has been improved. The new interface provides the user with a preview of the data to be imported and interactive methods to select the desired ranges.
  • The user manual, in its Info and HTML versions, now includes graphical output examples and screenshots.
  • New command SHOW SYSTEM to easily print system information useful in bug reports.
  • Build changes:
  • Perl is no longer required to build.
  • Build now requires Python 3.4 or later. (Building PSPP 1.4.0 also required Python, but it wasn't properly documented at the time.)
  • The Cairo and Pango libraries are now required.
  • gettext 0.20 or later is now required.
  • gtksourceview 4.x is now supported (3.x also remains supported).
  • Output improvements:
  • New drivers for output to TeX source files and to PNG files.
  • Table output styles may now be set with the new option --table-look and the new SET TLOOK command.
  • New driver option "trim" to remove empty space from PDF, PostScript, SVG, and PNG output files.
  • The PDF output driver now adds an outline to allow PDF viewers to display as a "table of contents" for the file.
  • The HTML output driver has a new option "bare".
  • New features in pspp-output:
  • New --table-look and --nth-commands options.
  • New get-table-look and convert-table-look commands.

New in PSPP 1.4.0 (Jan 10, 2022)

  • The file pspp-mode.el (the pspp-mode for Emacs) is no longer distributed with PSPP. Instead, it can be installed directly in emacs and is available from https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/pspp-mode.html
  • The Find dialog box, when searching for numeric values, will match only to the precision of the variable's print format. This avoids behaviour which is suprising to some users.
  • A bug where the Data|Select Cases|Random Sample menu would generate invalid syntax has been fixed.
  • FREQUENCIES will emit a warning if one or more weight values are missing.
  • Plain text output is no longer divided into pages, since it is now rarely printed on paper.
  • delimiter", and "--qualifier" options to control CSV output.
  • Improvements to SAVE DATA COLLECTION support for MDD files.
  • Bug fix for CVE-2018-20230.
  • The /RENAME subcommand in SAVE TRANSLATE et al. has been extended to support the syntax also accepted by other software.
  • The EXAMINE command will now perform the Shapiro-Wilk test when one or more plots are requested.
  • The REGRESSION command now supports the /STATISTICS=TOL option which outputs tolerance and variance inflation factor metrics for the data.
  • The QUICK CLUSTER command now supports the /SAVE option which can be used to save the cases' cluster membership and/or their distance from the cluster centre to the active file.
  • The MEANS command has been re-implemented.
  • The GUI now has a sub-dialog for post-hoc tests of the oneway anova test.
  • Gtk+3.22.0 or later must now be used when building.
  • GRAPH: Categorical barcharts displaying percentages now show the sub-category as a percentage of the primary category instead of the total.
  • The Syntax Window now has a Find function to perform simple text searching.
  • PSPP now supports the SPSS viewer (.spv) format that SPSS 16 and later use to save the contents of its output editor:
  • PSPP and PSPPIRE can write output to .spv files.
  • The new utility pspp-output can convert .spv files to other formats.
  • The pspp-convert utility can now decrypt encrypted .spv files. The encrypted viewer file format is unacceptably insecure, so to discourage its use PSPP and PSPPIRE do not directly read or write this format.
  • pspp-convert improvements:
  • New "-a", "-l", "--password-list" options to search for an encrypted file's password.
  • New "--keep" and "--drop" options to output only selected variables.
  • New "--recode", "--no-var-name", "--labels", "--print-formats", "--decimal", "--
  • AUTORECODE:
  • The PRINT subcommand is now implemented.
  • Many bug fixes.

New in PSPP 0.10.2 (Jul 24, 2016)

  • CROSSTABS implements a new COUNT subcommand to round case or cell weights.

New in PSPP 0.10.1 (Apr 3, 2016)

  • Bug fixes, including the following:
  • A bug where certain dialog boxes could not be properly populated has been fixed.
  • Various commands have been hardened against errors when called with invalid syntax.
  • Translation updates.

New in PSPP 0.10.0 (Mar 26, 2016)

  • The QUICK CLUSTER command has a /PRINT subcommand which shows the initial cluster centres and the final cluster membership of each case. The clustering algorithm has also been updated, so as to produce better separated clusters.
  • A Russian localisation has been contributed.
  • The GRAPH command now has a /BAR subcommand to draw barcharts.
  • If the DECIMAL character is set to COMMA then the ',' character will not be treated as a separator by DATA LIST.
  • The pspp-convert utility can now decrypt encrypted syntax files. The encrypted syntax file format is unacceptably insecure, so to discourage its use PSPP and PSPPIRE do not directly read or write this format.
  • The IMPORTCASES subcommand on GET DATA is now ignored, for compatibility.
  • The graphical user interface (psppire) has been changed as follows:
  • It now uses Gtk+ version 3 instead of version 2. Accordingly, it has a somewhat different look and feel.
  • There is now a Graphs menu to access the GRAPH command.
  • The status of dialog box widgets are now preserved between calls to the same dialog box for the same dataset.
  • The dialog box for the Logistic Regression command will now infer that string variables or any varible with a "measure" of Nominal or Ordinal are to be treated as categorical variables and will generate syntax accordingly.
  • New commands:
  • SORT VARIABLES.
  • The following functions for transformation expressions are new:
  • REPLACE, for search-and-replace of one string with another.
  • STRUNC, to truncate a string and trim trailing spaces.
  • MEDIAN, to compute the median of its arguments.
  • The TRUNC function in expressions now supports additional arguments for truncating to values other than integers and to indicate a level of rounding fuzz. The default rounding fuzz may now be controlled and displayed with SET FUZZBITS and SHOW FUZZBITS, respectively.
  • Bug fixes, including the following notable ones:
  • The correlation coefficient in the paired samples t-test procedure is now correctly calculated when presented with weighted data.
  • The ESCAPE subcommand has been removed from GET DATA /TYPE=TXT. For compatibility, the behavior that ESCAPE enabled is now the default and only supported behavior.
  • Rendering of the variable and data sheets in right-to-left locales now works properly.
  • The Mann-Whitney test, when run on a dataset containing values of the group variable, other than those defining the test groups, would incorrectly calculate the ranks. This has been corrected.

New in PSPP 0.8.5 (Jun 22, 2015)

  • The FREQUENCIES and CROSSTABS commands can now generate barcharts.
  • The FACTOR command can now perform PROMAX rotations.
  • SPSS/PC+ system files are now supported on GET and other commands that read SPSS system files. The pspp-convert program can now read SPSS/PC+ system files. Writing the obsolete SPSS/PC+ system file format is not supported.
  • SYSFILE INFO can now read SPSS/PC+ system files and SPSS portable files.
  • FREQUENCIES: A bug was fixed where an assertion failure occured when an empty dataset was presented.
  • The GRAPH command is now available. Initially it supports scatterplots and histograms.
  • The RND operator in expressions now supports additional operands for rounding to values other than integers and to indicate a level of rounding fuzz. The default rounding fuzz may now be controlled and displayed with SET FUZZBITS and SHOW FUZZBITS, respectively.

New in PSPP 0.8.4 (Sep 29, 2014)

  • Formatting of SYSFILE INFO output was made easier to read.
  • Bug fixes, including the following notable ones:
  • FREQUENCIES works properly for string variables. (This bug was introduced in 0.8.2.)
  • CROSSTABS now correctly computes all of the measures that it offers. Some measures have been removed because they were not computed correctly.
  • The NPAR TESTS calculation of significance for the RUNS subcommand has been corrected.
  • Planned comparisons in ONEWAY ANOVA now correctly handle negative T-values.
  • Conformance fixes to Open Document output format.

New in PSPP 0.8.3 (Apr 25, 2014)

  • Independent T-Tests displayed the standard error of the difference and the confidence interval for the unequal variances case, where the equal variances case should have been. This has been fixed.
  • REGRESSION now recognises /STATISTICS=CI(x) which causes confidence intervals for the coefficients to be printed.
  • When DESCRIPTIVES calculates Z scores, it now omits cases filtered by the current FILTER settings.
  • PSPPIRE graphical user interface improvements:
  • Dialog boxes with source variable lists can now choose the sort order; right click and select from the popup menu.
  • File|Open now allows an encoding to be selected for opening system files.
  • File|Display Data File Information|External File... now allows an encoding to be selected.
  • A problem with the Means dialog has been resolved (bug #41433).
  • Several problems related to the input of spreadsheets have been fixed (bug #41657, #41620)
  • System file related improvements:
  • With ENCODING="DETECT", SYSFILE INFO can now help the user to pick an encoding for reading a system file that does not identify its own encoding
  • SYSFILE INFO now accepts an ENCODING subcommand to specify the character encoding of string data in the system file.
  • Variable labels over 255 bytes long are now accepted without truncation (bug #41863).
  • System files that contain duplicate variable names may now be read successfully (bug #41475).

New in PSPP 0.8.2 (Jan 14, 2014)

  • Charts are now rendered with colours from the Tango palette instead of fully saturated primaries.
  • Support for new system file variants:
  • PSPP can now read and write ZCOMPRESSED system files, which compress data much more effectively than older "compressed" files. (The older format is still supported.)
  • PSPP can now decrypt encrypted system files, using the new pspp-convert utility. The encrypted system file format is unacceptably insecure, so to discourage its use PSPP and PSPPIRE do not directly read or write this format.
  • Missing values for long string variables are now read from and written to system files in an SPSS-compatible fashion. (Earlier versions of PSPP that supported missing values for long string variables wrote them to system files in an SPSS-incompatible way. To fix the problem, read the system file with this version of PSPP and then save a new copy of it.)
  • pspp-convert, a new standalone utility for converting SPSS system and portable files to other formats, is now included. The initial version supports comma-separated value files as output format. pspp-convert can also decrypt encrypted system files.
  • Build changes:
  • zlib is now a required dependency.

New in PSPP 0.8.1 (Sep 24, 2013)

  • New commands:
  • VARIABLE ROLE.
  • Changes to existing commands:
  • CROSSTABS: The requirement that one expected count must be less than five before Fishers Exact Test will be reported has been removed.
  • PSPPIRE graphical user interface improvements:
  • A new set of icons has been contributed.
  • Syntax windows now parse syntax in "auto" mode, which in practice should mean that both "batch" and "interactive" syntax now works, instead of just "interactive" syntax.
  • The variable pane of data windows now include a Role column.
  • Notable bug fixes:
  • System files written by IBM SPSS 21 are now read without warnings.
  • System files written by "VOXCO INTERVIEWER 4.3" are now read without warnings.
  • PSPPIRE should now more gracefully handle syntax files that contain errors.