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SPSS Advantage™ for Excel® 2007

SPSS Advantage for Excel Home

Capabilities

Getting started

SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 seamlessly integrates into the Excel interface. Just click on “SPSS Advantage” from the Excel menu and select a procedure from the ribbon to get started. Each SPSS function is operated through a wizard or tabbed dialog—making it easy for you to get results. You don’t need the scripting or programming skills often required to utilize complex statistical products.

Conduct RFM analysis

Recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM) analysis is a technique often used in direct marketing for identifying your most profitable customers. Experience has shown that recency (the most recent time you had an interaction with a customer), frequency (the number of interactions you have you have had with a customer), and monetary value (the amount of money you have received from the customer), are the best predictors of a propensity to buy from you in the future.

With SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007, you can very easily conduct RFM analysis to identify these customers. Wizards help you create RFM scores for customer or transaction data by stepping you through RFM analysis. SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 also produces charts for diagnostic tests, which help you understand the distribution of your data. Once you have results, you’ll be ready to market to existing customers who are most likely to respond to a new offer.

This distribution chart shows the average monetary value for categories defined by recency and frequency scores. Darker areas indicate a higher average monetary value. In this example, the most recent and frequent customers also have a higher average monetary value. Click image to enlarge.

Easily identify groups

SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 enables you to create highly visual classification trees that help you identify market segments. For example, use classification trees to identify the characteristics of customers likely to buy certain product types. Because you display results visually, you can more clearly spot relationships in your data. This advanced, yet easy-to-use classification tree analysis enables you to explore results and find specific subgroups and relationships in your data that you might not uncover by using the statistics in Excel.


This classification tree predicts the average price that people will pay for a car. Each node of the tree displays the mean (average) price paid, the standard deviation, and the number of cases (rows) in the node. This example shows that income is the most important factor affecting average purchase price. Click image to enlarge.

Find unusual data

Now that Excel datasets can be much larger than before, it’s no longer possible to “eyeball” your data to make sure nothing is amiss. Additionally, more data means a higher risk of bad data. A specific procedure in SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 enables you to catch problem data so that you can remove or correct them prior to analysis.

Use this procedure to detect invalid values caused by data entry errors and to detect truly unusual cases that are unsuitable for analysis. SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 will highlight the cell of data and provide a brief explanation as to why it found it anomalous.

Prepare and transform data

SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 provides you with procedures that enable you to prepare and transform data. Use these procedures to reorganize data and put them in a format to aid analysis. Additionally, you gain more options to explore data, which makes it easier to find value in larger datasets.

Join tables

With SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007, you can merge two Excel tables based on criteria that match rows in one table with rows in the other table.

Restructure data

You can restructure tables to combine information from multiple rows. For example, use this procedure to restructure transactional data. You can create a single row for each customer, with each transaction recorded in a separate column—giving you a new way to look at the data.

Aggregate rows

Combine groups of rows in a selected table into single rows, to easily create a new, aggregated table containing summary data for each group. For example, if you have a table that records each purchase made by a customer on a separate row and identifies each customer by a unique ID value, you can group the records by ID value. SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 enables you to create an aggregated table with one row for each customer, using selected summary values for other columns from the original table.

Group data into ranges

Sometimes you want to “bin” data so that you can look at it ranges. For example, you might want to group ages by ranges (less than 20, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, and so forth) to examine the buying habits of different age groups. The bin values procedure in SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 provides you with an easy-to-use interface to establish data ranges.

See the distribution of your data and customize cutpoints in the
Bin Values dialogue. Click image to enlarge.


SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 presents you with automatically set cutpoints that you can customize to best fit the distribution of your data. When you save binned values, SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 creates a new column containing data grouped into ranges. You can also create a new column containing text values that describes each range, as well as a column containing the sequential integer values assigned to each range category in ascending order.


Optimize bins for models

With SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007, you can transform scale-type data by distributing the values into bins. You can then use the binned data instead of original data values for further analysis. For example, you might want to optimize data into bins to safeguard the privacy of data sources. Instead of reporting the actual values, you can use the binned numbers. Additionally, some analysis is more efficient when working with a reduced number of variables. Optimized binning creates groups for the column of choice (such as ages) in relation to another variable (such as education level).

Save Excel tables to native SPSS data files

For additional data management and analysis capabilities, you may want to consider updating to the full version of SPSS. Whether you choose to do this in the near or long-term future, you will be able to use your Excel tables in SPSS. SPSS Advantage for Excel 2007 enables you to save Excel tables in SPSS-formatted data files.