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Sarah Brunson's profile image
Sarah Brunson posted Mon July 21, 2025 06:02 PM

Hi, 

I am trying to restructure my data but keep getting only question marks for the results. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!

David Dwyer's profile image
David Dwyer

Hi @Sarah Brunson

Seeing question marks in the Data Editor is often indicative of SPSS Statistics "still working" on the task you've set.  Do these question marks ever resolve into legitimate values?  Or does SPSS Statistics appear to be "hung". What is the value shown in the status bar at the bottom of the Data Editor window (e.g. "Running EXECUTE . . .' , "SPSS Statistics processor available" or maybe "SPSS Statistics processor unavailable")?

What kind of restructuring are you trying to do and how are you going about it?  For instance, are you trying to FLIP a dataset with 10 million observations and 10 variables and turn it into one with 10 observations and 10 million variables?  That will be quite resource intense.

If you have an active Support agreement, please do Open a Case with IBM SPSS Statistics Support and we can pursue this more fully.