Cragun, R. (2013) ‘Using SPSS and PASW’, Wikibooks. Available at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Using_SPSS_and_PASW.

A useful (and free) wiki book giving a series of mini SPSS tutorials. For this chapter, have a look through the section on basic operations.

De Vaus, D. (2002) Analyzing Social Science Data: 50 Key Problems and Data Analysis. London: SAGE.

Parts One and Two give quite detailed answers to frequently asked questions about data preparation in the form of 15 problems like ‘How to code answers with multiple answers’.

Diamantopoulos, A. and Schlegelmilch, B. (1997) Taking the Fear Out of Data Analysis. London: Dryden Press. Republished by Cengage Learning, 2000.

Chapter 4 is about data preparation and transformation, but beware that the image of a data matrix is rather dated and does not look like an SPSS matrix.