Summaries of individual variables provide an important "first look" at your data. Some of the tasks that these summaries help you to complete are listed below.

- Determining "typical" values of the variables. What values occur most often? What range of values are you likely to see?
- Checking the assumptions for statistical procedures. Do you have enough observations? For each variable, is the observed distribution of values adequate?
- Checking the quality of the data. Are there missing or mis-entered values? Are there values that should be recoded?

The Frequencies procedure is useful for obtaining summaries of individual variables. The following examples show how Frequencies can be used to analyze variables measured at nominal, ordinal, and scale levels.