Good day

Currently the logs in my output do not work, so there are no encodings to copy a syntax from.

I already clicked edit: options: display commands in the log about 2 weeks ago. From then on, log does show up again in the left summary table of the output, but it did nothing to the previous months of analysis and work I've already done. What can I do with this? I don't want to have to redo everything, unfortunately I don't know anything about spss so I hope this is possible.

Hi @Monica Raadsveld
The "display commands in the log" checkbox in the user interface issues the "SET PRINTBACK=LISTING."  command. Thereafter, all commands generated by the user interface are echoed to the Log object in the Output Viewer.  Unfortunately, this is a chicken and egg sort of thing.  If you weren't echoing commands to the Log previously, the only way to get them into the Log will be to run them again.

Fortunately, IBM SPSS Statistics keeps a running tally of commands run and errors/warnings resulting. See the "Edit -> Options" menu and "File Locations" tab.  This tab will show you the location of the "statistics.jnl" file. 

Got to this file and open it with your favorite text editor.  The default for this file is to 'apppend', so it is likely to be quite large if you've done a lot of work since installing Statistics.  Start from the end and work backwards copying your desired commands to a new Command Syntax Window.  In this way you should be able to create a command file for everything you've done.

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David Dwyer
SPSS Technical Support
IBM Software
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