What Business Analytics

Business Analytics is the study of data through statistical and operations analysis, the formation of predictive models, application of optimization techniques and the
 communication of these results to customers, business partners and colleague executives.

There are different package (SPSS, SAS, MS excel, KXEN,MATLAB etc) available in the market for this . Its really hard to say which one is best, as every package has
its own advantage and disadvantage.

Now, lets discuss more about SPSS and some facts.

1) SPSS stand for statistical Package for the social science.
2) SPSS incorporated is a leading worldwide provider of predictive analytics software and soltion.
3) First version of SPSS was released was in 1968.
4) The company was announced on July 28,2009 that is was being acquired by IBM for 1.2 billion.
5) Latest version of SPSS is 21, released on Aug 2012.
6) With SPSS, we can analyze data in three different ways.
a) Describe data using descriptive statistics. Ex : Frequency, Mean
b) examining relationship b/w variable. Ex: Correlation, Regression,
c) Compare group to determine . Ex : t- test, ANOVA etc .
7) There are two different types of widow in SPSS.
1st - Data Editor Window . This is again are divided into two tabs.
   a) Data View - Is used to enter data and view data.
   b) Variable View - Is used to create and define various variables.
2nd - Output Viewer Window  - This is broken into two parts .
  Left part -  Outline of Output Pane
  Right Part - Result of Analysis
 
8) You have menu bar in Data editor of SPSS. Ex : File, Edit, View, DATA, Transform menu etc.
9) By default, SPSS format data files ( .sav extension ) are displayed.
10) Analyze menu contain a list of general reporting and statistical analysis categories .
     a) Descriptive Analysis - The descriptive procedure display univariate summery ststistic for several variable in single table and calculate standardized value(z score).

11) SPSS usages in different area.

General use. SPSS is a package that many beginners enjoy because it is very easy to use.  SPSS has a "point and click" interface that allows you to use pulldown menus
to select commands that you wish to perform. SPSS does have a "syntax" language which you can learn by "pasting" the syntax from the point and click menus, but the
syntax that is pasted is generally overly complicated and often unintuitive.

Data Management. SPSS has a friendly data editor that resembles Excel that allows you to enter your data and attributes of your data (missing values, value labels, etc.)
 However, SPSS does not have very strong data management tools (although SPSS version 11 added commands for reshaping data files from "wide" format to "long" format,
 and vice versa).  SPSS primarily edits one data file at a time and is not very strong for tasks that involve working with multiple data files at once.  There is no
 limit to the number of variables or cases allowed in your SPSS data files - you are only limited only by your disk space.

Statistical Analysis. SPSS performs most general statistical analyses (regression, logistic regression, survival analysis, analysis of variance, factor analysis,
 and multivariate analysis).  The greatest strengths of SPSS are in the area of analysis of variance (SPSS allows you to perform many kinds of tests of specific effects)
 and multivariate analysis (e.g., manova, factor analysis, discriminant analysis) and SPSS 11.5 has added some capabilities for analyzing mixed models.  The greatest
 weakness of SPSS are probably in the absence of robust methods (we know of no abilities to perform robust regression or to obtain robust standard errors), and the
 absence of survey data analysis in the basic package (some procedures are available in an add-on module in SPSS version 12).

Graphics. SPSS has a very simple point and click interface for creating graphs and once you create graphs they can be extensively customized via its point
 and click interface.  The graphs are very high quality and can be pasted into other documents (e.g., Word documents or PowerPoint).  SPSS does have a syntax language
 for creating graphs but many of the features in the point and click interface are not available via the syntax language.  The syntax language is more complicated than
 the language provided by Stata, but probably simpler (but less powerful) than the SAS language.

Summary. SPSS focuses on ease of use (their motto is "real stats, real easy"), and it succeeds in this area.  But if you intend to use SPSS as a power user, you may
outgrow it over time. SPSS is strong in the area of graphics, but weak in more cutting edge statistical procedures lacking in robust methods and survey methods.