Sometimes you may want to show a summary statistic of the values in a numeric variable rather than grouping the values into bands. For example, you may want to show the base, minimum, maximum, and mean values, or the standard deviation. For example, the visits variable in the Museum sample data set is a numeric variable that stores the number of times respondents have visited the museum before. You can show a summary of the values in the variable, as shown in the following table:

In practice you might want to mix both approaches: for example, show bands and the mean value. You would typically create your bands first, as shown in Banding a numeric variable, then switch to the Edit tab and insert the statistics as described below. If you want to be able to use different approaches in different tables (for example, show bands in some tables and a summary in others) you would typically create a copy of the variable and set up the bands in one variable and the summary in the other. See Copying a variable for more information.

These instructions describe how to create the summary statistics so that they appear in all tables. If you want the statistics to appear in a specific table, use the Edit Axis dialog box instead of the Edit Variable dialog box. The steps within the dialog box are the same. See Edit Axis dialog box for more information.